Home is where The Horse is

It was the run-up to Christmas, some 15 years back, when I was working as an examiner in Tokyo. We were sitting, George, Alistair and myself, side-by-side at the long desk, writing, marking, doodling. Pretending to be busy. Each one of us absorbed, the office soporifically quiet in the post-lunch slowdown.

And then our secretary shoved a Christmas card under my nose, asking me to sign it.

Now Christmas is firmly, though not deeply, rooted in the Japanese calendar. Meaning, essentially, that the festive commercial hoopla throughout November and December would easily rival that in any Western country. And, Japan being Japan, it meant also that Christmas had become one of those times in which one looks to maintaining and developing one's relationships.

“Who’s it to?” I asked.

The reply left me shruggingly ignorant. People I’d never met who worked for a company I’d never heard of. But people with whom we had business relations, however tenuous, so they were on our Christmas list. I squiggled my signature and shunted the card along to Alistair.

Five minutes later came another card, to a set of equally anonymous people. Sign. Shunt.

And then, another five minutes having passed, yet another card plopped on the table in front of me. So this time, working on the premise that its intended recipients had never heard of me either, I signed it with cheery good wishes and the name of an infamous British murderer.

And so it went.

By the end of the afternoon, 15 separate groups of people had been heartily bidden the compliments of the season by an incarcerated serial killer.

Well, it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?