George Orwell was a blogger ahead of his time. He wrote daily, obsessively, and about everything from war to English cooking (a defence of which was one of his less convincing essays). In A Nice Cup of Tea, he identified 11 principles for proper tea-making, and although he conceded that at least four were "acutely controversial", his treatment of the subject has never been bettered, writes Frank McNally
He always wrote with a reporter's detachment, most famously of an incident during the Spanish Civil War when, sticking his head above the parapet one morning, he was hit in the throat by a bullet that narrowly missed his carotid artery.
"The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail," he commented later, with typical understatement. His analytical instincts did not desert him even in the face of death. "There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting - I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time." That he is now best known for novels about totalitarianism and for Homage to Catalonia, from which the previous paragraph quotes, he would have seen as an historical accident.
He has also been called "the first serious student of the ordinary", an epitaph he would probably have preferred. "In a peaceful age, I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties," he suggested late in life. "As it is, I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer." Despite being a devout atheist, he wrote with affection about Christmas, and two essays on the subject bookend his writing career. First there is Clink, written of his time as a tramp in 1931 and of a failed attempt to get himself a jail sentence for Christmas.
He went about the plan with the usual thoroughness, first choosing London's East End, where he calculated that police would be less tolerant, and then spending his last few shillings on beer and whiskey. The drink acted quickly on an empty stomach, so that when he downed the last of it, in full view of two policemen, he collapsed spontaneously.
His reporter's eye was still running, however, like a camera in a documentary film. "My brain remains clear long after my legs and speech have gone," he wrote, almost apologetically. Thus he found himself admiring the skill of the police officers as they jollied him along to the station and later, "horribly sick", making a sympathetic study of his companions in the holding cells.
His fellow delinquents included a pub landlord who had embezzled the Christmas club to pay off debts to the brewery. He faced a jail term as well as bankruptcy proceedings, and would never hold a pub licence again. "The fact that his life was at an end, as far as any decent position in society went, was gradually sinking into him," Orwell wrote. In general, he found the inmates less worried about prison than about losing their jobs, and thought this "symptomatic of the dwindling power of the law compared with that of the capitalist".
The writer himself did not succeed in getting jail time, however, and was ejected back into the bustle of the pre-Christmas streets. "I made several more attempts to get into trouble, but I seemed to bear a charmed life. No one took any notice." Fifteen Christmases later, in 1946, Orwell was the world-famous author of Animal Farm and had started work on 1984. Yet in a newspaper essay, he took time out to defend the ancient yuletide custom of eating and drinking too much, even at a cost to one's health. The "only reasonable motive" for restraint at this time, he thought, was if someone else needed the food more than you: "A deliberately austere Christmas would
be an absurdity."
Teetotallers and vegetarians were always "scandalised" by this attitude, Orwell wrote: "As they see it, the only rational objective is to avoid pain and stay alive as long as possible." But children were instinctively on the side of the Romans, who had celebrated Saturnalia long before Christ's birthday was arbitrarily superimposed on it. Christmas was not a time for temperate enjoyment, children knew, but for "fierce pleasures which they are quite willing to pay for with a certain amount of pain".
Minus a few details, Orwell's description of the typical family Christmas holds up well. You could still make a checklist from the essential features he records, including the "quarrels over toys" all Christmas morning, the "battle with enormous platefuls of turkey", the "momentary panic when it is rumoured that Baby has swallowed a threepenny bit", and the "castor oil on December 27th".
Of course, he was describing this ideal Christmas from memory rather than observance. In December 1946, toys were scarce and turkeys scarcer. "From Brussels to Stalingrad, unaccounted millions are living in the cellars of bombed houses, in hide-outs in the forest, or in squalid huts behind barbed wire," he wrote. In such circumstances, a "proper Christmas" was impossible: "But we will have one sooner or later, in 1947, or 1948, or even 1949." Orwell would not enjoy a proper Christmas again, in fact. His health had already seriously deteriorated in 1946. Even as he continued writing 1984, tuberculosis was wearing him down. He spent the rest of his life in and out of hospitals and sanitoriums, and the Christmas of 1949 would be his last before a lung haemorrhage did for him what a bullet in the throat could not.
He left an extraordinary amount of writing for a man who died at 47. But a puritanical work ethic had always driven him, whether he was sick or not. Near the end, he said of his life: "There has literally not been one day in which I did not feel I was idling."