The Round Robin Letters

The Ultimate Collection of Christmas Letters

Simon Hoggart

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782399551
• Print ISBN:
  9781782395867
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology

A new cover reissue of Simon Hoggart's wonderfully funny collection of round robin letters—the perfect antidote for anyone suffering from an excess of Christmas cheer. Every Christmas, unwanted round robin letters, stuffed with news of young Chloe's nauseating excellence at—well—everything, the announcement of Janet's cousin's husband's friend's divorce, or the details of Terry's colonoscopy, accumulate on doormats. One day, Simon Hoggart decided to do something about it. He mercilessly presented the most eye-popping examples of such letters in his bestseller, The Cat that Could Open the Fridge, and followed it up with The Hamster that Loved Puccini, hoping he had put a stop to them. And yet the letters, booklets, and photo-montages kept on coming. So here, to drive home his message, The Round Robin Letters brings together his two collections in an anthology that will have everyone choking with laughter on their Christmas pudding.

Contents

Introduction

The Cat that Could Open the Fridge

A Little Diamond to Polish

The Stubbed Toe Blackspot

The Pyramids (Overrated)

The Cat that Could Open the Fridge

The Hairy Archbishop

Oh Dear, What a Plonker!

The Whole Darn Human Race

Dining Table for Sale. Any Offers?

Payment in Canned Goose Liver

The Hamster that Loved Puccini

The Peccadillo of Proud Parenthood

The Sin of Smug Self-Satisfaction

The Iniquity of Intemperate Information

The Melancholy Mawkishness of Misery

The Wickedness of Whimsy

The Sophistry of Sanctimony

The Vice of Vituperation

Introduction

DEAR ALL,

Well, what a busy year it’s been! Where to start? The main job, apart from looking after our amazingly talented children, enjoying luxury holidays in some of the world’s most exotic places – or crossing them on a very grumpy camel [!] – building a new conservatory, organizing our local opera festival (though I say it myself, to rather gratifying acclaim!) and being frequently promoted at work, has been producing the book you hold in your hands!!!!

To be frank, and to lapse into non-newsletter English, it hasn’t been that much work, since this consists of two books that have been published separately as hardbacks, The Cat that Could Open the Fridge and The Hamster that Loved Puccini. Cat was published in 2004, and Hamster the following year. They clearly touched a nerve. There can hardly be a family in the land that hasn’t received one of these letters, and there can hardly be a reader who at some time hasn’t uttered a cry of rage and despair before flinging them into the waste basket or recycling bin. The worst thing about any affliction is having to bear it alone, and I suspect the books had the remedial effect for many people of demonstrating that others were suffering too. Just knowing that can help relieve the pain.

I first started receiving round robin letters, or Christmas newsletters as some drearily persistent pedants insist they should be called, about ten years ago. (The modern usage of ‘round robin’, originally a shipboard petition, certainly dates back to the 1940s.) One phenomenon I’ve noticed is that some people hate them so much that it’s often not enough just to throw them away; they need to get them out of the house, which seems to be a form of exorcism. Some people even find that ripping them up is not an adequate response; they tape them back together before sending the results on. If the senders recognize themselves in the Guardian, for which I write a column, or inside the covers of this book, they think, so much the better. They deserve to be punished. Indeed, some readers demand that I name and shame the writers, though I think this would be unfair. They may be smug, boastful and self-regarding, or in some cases unhappy souls who want to inflict all their sorrows upon others – presumably on the principle that if a trouble shared is a trouble halved, then one wished upon 100 people is reduced in effect to 1 per cent. But they deserve their privacy. For that reason, all the names in these two books have been changed, though I have tried to reflect age and class. So a Tarquin in the original letter might become a Tristan but not a Wayne; Edith could be Doris, but not Sharon.

The first letters came to me at the Guardian, from readers who hoped I might describe the terrible effect they can have on some recipients. Sometimes this was possible, but not easy, given the constraints of a newspaper column. Frequently the effect of the letters is cumulative: academic success for the children is followed by a highly paid new job for the father, a wonderful trip somewhere expensive, and glad tidings about a new vacuum cleaner. Almost as often the reverse is true: difficulties at work are matched by troubles with teenagers, a camping holiday in France when it rains six days out of seven, and ongoing problems with the septic tank. Indeed, the title of The Cat that Could Open the Fridge comes from a 2,000-word letter in which the writer suffers almost every misfortune modern man can undergo – mostly medical, but including a broken-down car, a ride on the London Eye in mist and rain, and various mishaps befalling his children. Then at the end, he reveals that the family’s pet cat has learned how to open the fridge, so leading to every pet-owner’s nightmare: the animal that can help itself.

Some readers and friends thought a collection of the letters would work, but I was doubtful. Reprinting them in full would be as tedious an experience for people who bought the book as it had been for the original recipients. Yet many required lengthy contemplation to release the full horror, rather in the way that a fine wine needs time and space to breathe before it reveals its qualities. It was Jane Turnbull, now my agent, who spotted that a mixture of brevity and wordiness might work. I am very grateful to her for her ideas and encouragement, and to Toby Mundy, the head of Atlantic Books, for his encouragement, and money.

As I said, the book touched a nerve, and material continued to pour in. The result was a new book, The Hamster that Loved Puccini. The title came from a letter in which it was reported that a family pet who nibbled indifferently on its food while other operatic composers were on the CD-player, would leap on to his wheel and start spinning joyfully the moment ‘One Fine Day’ or ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’ began. This was clearly a joke, or at least a coincidence, so the tale served to illustrate the way some round robin writers were becoming more self-aware, more ironic, anxious not to take themselves too seriously.

People often ask how these letters started. I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure they began in the United States, where most social trends see the light of day. American families are often spread far and wide; folk will happily up sticks and move from Maine to New Mexico, Oregon to Florida, leaving behind family and close friends. The Christmas, or holiday newsletters, as they are generally known there, are perfect for filling in the gaps in people’s lives. If the writers have lived next door for more than fourteen years, then you want to know how Gwen is getting on in college and whether Frank’s new job worked out. A disproportionately large number come from the Commonwealth, and for the same reason. The tone varies from smug to slightly desperate: ‘Look, we made the right decision. Yes, we miss Nan, but it’s sunny almost every day, the kids spend every weekend at the beach, the wine is great…’ Everything is compared to the old country and the letters seek to validate the writer’s decision to abandon it.

When did they become so numerous? By a slow but steady growth, linked to the development of technology. (I like the fantasy of Mrs William Caxton writing the first ever round robin in 1477: ‘I haven’t seen much of Will lately – he’s been far too busy playing with his new German “printing press”. Boys and their toys, eh?’.) Centuries later, carbon paper in a typewriter would produce three readable copies, and two more which nobody could make out. The Gestetner or Roneo made it easy for people to make a ‘stencil’ which could then be rolled on to a drum and used to print as many copies as you wanted. But almost nobody had access to one of these at home. Then came the photocopier, which could be used at work, provided you didn’t make it too obvious. This meant that almost anyone – almost anyone with a middle-class office job, that is – could print off as many copies as they wanted quickly and easily. (The newsletter is very middle class; I can’t think of one I’ve read that clearly comes from a working-class family. That’s not to say that all the writers are well off; many are members of the nouveaux pauvres, working in less well-paid white-collar jobs, such as librarians and teachers.)

But of course it was the home computer that made mass production of newsletters both easy and satisfying. For the first time pictures could be reproduced properly (‘Jill in party mode! Pssst! Don’t anybody let on it was the big Five-0!’; ‘Harry, proud captain of the team which won the regional cup for under-11’s.’) Decorations appeared in the margins, their jollity sometimes in inverse proportion to the content of the letter, so that news of a painful hernia operation might be accompanied by laughing Santas and sprigs of holly. The home computer now means that you can run off endless letters at a keystroke: when the machine asks ‘Number of copies?’ you type in ‘100’, and go off to make a cup of tea. As it happens, almost nobody has 100 friends (or at least 100 people who want to know every detail of your lives, which is a different thing). That’s why so many wind up in the hands of people who really don’t want them. ‘I knew these people when they lived next door to my brother, 15 years ago. I have no interest in them or their lives or their four wonderful children…’ ‘I met this man at a conference in Derby when we had a couple of drinks together. Big mistake! It has condemned me to receiving this annual farrago of boastful nonsense.’

Self-publishing has been booming since computers made it so cheap. I have been sent one American letter in the form of a 200-page book. Some recipients take revenge. One family is so incensed by an arrogant round robin they get every year that they scrawl offensive remarks about the letter all over it. Then the next one to visit another city posts it back from there, so that the senders can never work out which of their unlucky readers is doing it. I feel slightly hurt on behalf of these people, although there is a simple remedy: stop sending the things.

Some people imagine it’s an age thing and that most of the letters come from the elderly and retired. That is not the case. The impulse to start sending often seems to come with setting up a first home. Some children start to help ‘write’ the family letter from birth, and in one terrible example here, while still in utero.

Again, people sometimes wonder which letters are most enraging. I’m afraid that, like all journalists, I often find that what is most annoying or disastrous makes the best material. It’s like the probably true tale of the hack in Northern Ireland who sees a massive bomb explosion and says, ‘Wow, great story!’ In the same way the more conceited or dementedly over the top a letter is, the more I relish it, even if it has made the original recipient gibber with rage. I suspect, though, that the worst of all are those from the proselytizing religious, most especially those who see God’s hand in all the good things that happen to them, and blithely ignore the pain and misery suffered by others. The implication that, if you share their faith, you too will have beautiful, clever children and take your holidays in the Maldives, is enough to drive anyone to homicide.

As the media pressure continues, a degree of self-awareness is creeping in. But the sheer quantity of letters seems to be as great as ever – if not greater, since more people are learning how to make use of their home computers. Every year I appeal for Guardian readers to send in their choicest examples, and every year several hundred arrive. Here are some recent – and like every other letter in this book, entirely genuine – examples that came in after the first volumes were originally published. Children still have the starring roles in most missives: ‘Not only does Tami know how to spell words such as “bisect” and “exhaust” (year 4 key spelling skills) but she also knows many of her multiplication tables.’ We are not told how old Tami is – she might be seventeen, for example.

Sometimes parents hint at disappointments: ‘Harry has got a job working in a KFC in the motorway service station’ does not imply that the glittering prizes are in view. Or, of a teenager, ‘she is growing in confidence and can now take buses on her own.’ Some sad medical history there, perhaps. ‘Rowan has a part-time job working in a chic restaurant and gets to meet some of Newcastle’s A-list celebrities.’ I wonder who’s on the B-list?

Recipients remain just as cross. ‘I have met this woman twice in my life, and have never set eyes on any of the innumerable people mentioned in her wretched letter,’ is typical. An English couple living in Chicag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright Page