Is November too early to be playing Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You - or even Fairytale In New York come to that?

That is what I was asking on kmfm Drivetime last week. I know there are five weeks to go until Christmas but Coke’s ‘Holidays are coming’ TV advert aired during the X Factor two weeks ago and to me that means Christmas has started. The lovable John Lewis snowman advert is capturing our attention too, so Mariah’s top festive tune is acceptable, right?

Kent was divided with their answers so I held off from playing it – for now.

But whatever happens, the festivities are just around the corner and I’m looking forward to them with the same excitement as the children have in the Coca-Cola ad when they see the lorry approaching. But why has no one ever questioned what a 50 tonne lorry is doing driving through a village?

The biggest A list celebrities to grace us with their presence recently have been Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The Hollywood stars have been living in Ickham, near Canterbury, whilst Brad finished his forthcoming zombie movie World War Z. With this in mind I was asking on kmfm Drivetime, “Have you ever physically touched a celebrity?” For example, has someone on TV brushed past you? Has a star shaken your hand?

Nick called me to say he stood next to Des Lynam at the urinals at a Kent golf club. He was claiming air was the physical contact so I could not ‘grade’ his effort. However, Ceri from the coast called to say she once received a kiss on both cheeks from actor Ray Winstone. He’s a big name so I graded that a seven out of 10. Then followed a succession of celebrity stories; Sarah Hodgkinson revealed that Jonathan Ross was behind her as she exited a plane and he breathed on her hair. He’s a TV household name– that was also a seven out of 10.

Lynnette Hanson measured the inside of Wet Wet Wet’s Marti Pelow’s leg. That’s impressive and received eight out of 10. Denise Bottali posted on Facebook to say she once drove her trolley into Joanna Lumley’s heel at Safeway in Canterbury. Not only was there physical contact, but Denise nearly injured a celebrity – and that is a totally new topic!

Stay listening to kmfm as you can win Kent’s Biggest Hits throughout December. Not only are we playing you the biggest hits, we are now giving you the chance to win them too. Plus, we have the biggest artists taking over kmfm over Christmas. JLS and The Wanted are just two of the bands you can hear soon. Speak to you on the way home!

by David Jones

Life can become one big Groundhog Day if you’re not careful as your dotage beckons.

You get the feeling you’ve done that before, only yesterday, or was it the day before? But in fact it was last year.

It’s an age thing, of course. Time flashes by more quickly as the years pass. This phenomenon has no scientific basis but most people of mature years will know exactly what I mean.

And with every special day, it feels as though we’ve been there before but it can’t possibly be a year ago. Indeed we have been there, but the rollercoaster of life spins ever faster as we get older, creating the illusion that the big memorable events come round every few months, not every year.

I am now convinced that Children in Need is staged at least every four months.

Supermarkets must take a large share of the blame for creating what I call the Codgers’ Time Machine, where festivals, birthdays, anniversaries and various celebrations pass before our eyes in an instant and the future arrives even more quickly.

It’s August. Christmas is almost upon us. It’s September. Bonfire Night can’t be far away. It’s February. Easter must be just around the corner.

Supermarkets foist their own timetables upon us with increasing aggression. Easter eggs are on sale before the last few slices of turkey in the freezer have been used up and Christmas cards on the shelves while it can often be hot enough for a barbecue.

The sound of fireworks exploding for two weeks before November 5 brought home to me once again how commercialisation is cheapening, or even destroying, our most cherished festivities. There’s a danger they will morph into one huge event.

Time was - or at least when I was growing up – that fireworks were set off and bonfires lit ONLY on November 5, irrespective of how close that date was to a weekend. It was unthinkable to let off fireworks on any other day.
Supermarkets and discount fireworks shops now flog fireworks for weeks before November 5.

Firework “overkill” has long since removed the fun and the anticipation which was the essence of Bonfire Night. Now you can hear them being set off on New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, Halloween, every Saturday and Sunday night for two or three weeks before November 5, and even afterwards.

On a wet Monday evening, exactly a week after Bonfire Night, fireworks were going off in several back gardens near us. Why bother with November 5 at all?

And, of course, firework displays are now an integral part of any national celebration, whether it be the Olympics or the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and even these national celebrations are often replicated at local level with still more firework displays.

Talking of national “celebrations,” I managed to get through Halloween with only one group of kids knocking at our front door. Perhaps the fact that I turned the porch light off helped to dissuade them. It would have been much better if my wife had let me pin to our front door the “typhoid outbreak here” notice I printed out last year.

Kids going from door to door demanding trick or treat is, of course an American “institution,” largely encouraged in Britain by pound shops and supermarkets anxious to shift as much Halloween junk as they can on to hapless parents before October 31.

Most people under 30 have no idea that it hasn’t always been like that. No pumpkins at £3 a time when I was a youngster and certainly no wandering the streets knocking on front doors. It was unheard of.

When I was about six or seven – like every other kid – I wished it could be Christmas or Bonfire Night every day. The way we are going it won’t be long before supermarkets make that “dream” come true for every kid, for Christmas, Bonfire Night, Easter and any other celebration you care to name. And then there will be no sense of excited expectation as that special day, whatever it may be, draws near.

How sad if every day became “special” and, at the same time, devoid of the magic which made it special. We seem to be heading that way fast.

What? Surely it’s not Christmas again already.

I’ve often wondered why, during a family meal, my mum will often instruct us to keep the same cutlery for the starter and main, saying ‘its French style today’.

The usual response she receives runs along the lines of ‘French style? Really? Do they ACTUALLY do that?!’, and no doubt the majority of our dinner guests assume such a declaration to be a clever avoidance tactic of extra washing up.

Even I, the token Dove family French student, have never been entirely convinced by this technique. Surely a sneaky napkin wipe or casual lick of fois-gras remnants from an all-purpose knife would be discouraged by the perfectionist country known worldwide to be the home of fine dining and haute-cuisine? 

Have us Brits not learnt anything about French restaurant etiquette from the Python boys’ ‘Dirty Fork’ sketch?

Well, after using the same cutlery set last week for vegetable quiche, duck à l’orange, spreading brie onto pieces of baguette and apple tart with whipped cream, I was forced to (literally) eat my words.

Whether a one-time faux-pas of the school chef or the entire kitchen staff’s devilish plot to play a game of ‘Educate The Anglophone’ I cannot say, but there we were, teachers and pupils alike, unwittingly mixing courses and flavours as gaily as can be. That old joke about the rabbit ‘mixing-his-toasties’ springs to mind. Anyway, the moral of the story: mums are always right.

At home in Kent, my family Christmas (and indeed any other special occasion) invariably consists of hypermarket-bought French nibbles.

In the past, fresh pizzas, snails in garlic, and Coquilles-st-Jacques have all made their way across the border, ready to grace dinner parties with their exotic presence.

Of course, that’s not to mention the boot-fuls of French wine, the production dates of which my Uncle always writes down in his little black book, and the vast assortment of cheeses with debatably-pronounced names which collectively produce a not-so-exotic aroma after two hours out of the fridge. Luxury.

I have some fond memories of these Dover to Calais trips; memories which perhaps the other Eurotunnel passengers at the time would not necessarily share.

A prominent moment which will always stay in my mind is the occasion we were caught red-handed by a customs officer leaning against the car munching on two baguettes and a selection of incredibly runny cheeses whilst waiting for our train to begin boarding.

Looking back, it probably wasn’t the brightest idea as we were at the very front of the queue, meaning that as soon as the first vehicles were directed to load onto the Shuttle, an extremely panicked not to mention messy scene ensued, involving a whole host of bread-cramming and excessive yelling on my mother’s part not to get crumbs on the seats of her (relatively) new car.I honestly have never (and possibly never will again) shoved that much brie into my pockets.

One thing is for sure; the glitz of French cuisine is certainly not quite so glamorous after four months of living here. Of course, it’s all still delicious, but the people themselves are definitely not as well-mannered as they like to appear.

At one of my schools for instance, soup has been served up twice now as a starter and on both occasions I was made to look incredibly posh just for picking up a spoon. Well, how else do you eat soup? I hear you ask. My point exactly.

You can imagine my shock when a roomful of usually-sophisticated teachers almost in unison lifted their bowls to their lips and began to sip. I say ‘sip’, when actually a far more appropriate expression would be ‘slurp’, or perhaps ‘see-how-much-noise-you-can-make-with-carrot-and-coriander’. I did get a second helping of tiramasu that day though, so it wasn’t all bad. Turns out firing the odd ‘bonjour’ at the school chef is always a good plan.

As a self-confessed ‘foody’, in many ways I am loving life here. Croissants and pain-au-chocolats every day for breakfast, ridiculously good value ‘Menu de jours' such as three hearty courses for just eleven euros, and supermarket ready meals which are actually healthy and non-artificial (today I ate a microwave paella complete with prawns, squid and mussels!).

I’ve even been to several ‘proper French’ dinner parties, details of which will be recounted to you shortly, yet there are aspects of English cuisine that France simply cannot replicate. Battered cod and mushy peas from the chippy for instance, a greasy Chinese takeaway and not forgetting a classic home-cooked roast dinner (hi again Mumma).

Can you tell I’m excited for half-term?

**  ABOVE: The French getting creative with their fast food.....yes, I have tried them both. And yes, bitterly disappointing. The bun wasn't even black!

by David Jones

Have you ever tried to persuade your Christmas dinner to come down from a tree? It’s not easy, I can tell you. But more of that later.

Alan Watkins’ splendid Codgers’ Club piece last month about growing up as a kid and the complete absence of the health and safety police struck a chord with me.

Strange, isn’t it, that as Codgerdom arrives, it’s easier to remember events more than half a century ago than to recall what happened last Wednesday.

Having fun required a great deal of creativity when you were growing up, as I did, in the early to mid-Fifties. Britain was a drab place then, still in the grip of post-war austerity.

Hard to believe now, but many people were still wearing the suits and coats they had worn during the war years. Of course, I didn’t know that then, aged only 10 or so, but later I realised that domestic life in Britain had barely changed at all between 1939 and 1955.

We lived in what could be described, in estate agent’s parlance, as a semi-rural location. Our small, old-fashioned bungalow had a large, rambling garden, about the size of half a football pitch.

My dad worked, just like everyone else, but we also had a smallholding. My parents kept chickens, rabbits and half a dozen geese in that large garden. It was wise not to upset the geese. They would advance, like a line of infantry, necks extended and hissing furiously. They were scary.

To the left at the bottom of our garden was a cornfield, swarming with rabbits. My father owned a shotgun and occasionally he would bag a couple for Sunday lunch. I had an air rifle but never managed to shoot anything. To the right was a meadow, with a grassy path leading down to a couple of unmade roads.

Like Codger Watkins, we made our own fun. Bike rides, daring each other to run through a field with a bull in it and endless fun with fireworks in the run-up to Bonfire Night.

Penny bangers which exploded with a thunderous crack and jumping jacks which would leap about unpredictably were affordable even on limited pocket money. Oh, and I’d also better mention the catapult I made to fire at old tin cans, using stones picked up from the beach as ammunition.

We had a huge poplar in our garden and I built a crude tree house in one of the massive forks in the branches. It was a 20ft climb to reach the platform. I never once put a foot wrong. We walked to school and back, on our own. There were no parental obsessions about paedophiles lurking round every corner.

It was a different, safer era, not least because there were far fewer cars on the roads. The real dangers for today’s kids are nearly always created by someone other than themselves.

At this point, I know that this Codger’s contribution is beginning to sound like an episode of the Darling Buds of May. It wasn’t idyllic as in the fictional world of Ma and Pa Larkin, but it was a pleasure growing up where there were more fields than houses.

Like all good things, it eventually had to come to an end. We grew up and our parents moved to a more urban location. Today, all the fields around our old bungalow are now housing estates and even our large garden has three or four houses on it.

But back to that Christmas dinner in the tree. One year, my parents bought a young turkey in Maidstone Market – not a frozen one but a turkey very much alive and kicking.

It used to run around with the chickens. It was one of my jobs to feed it and it grew rapidly. Every evening, as dusk approached, it would fly up into a tree and refuse to come down, despite my best efforts to persuade it to rejoin the chickens by doing a passable impression of a turkey calling to its mate.

There were no credit cards then and if your parents didn’t have the money, it didn’t get bought. There were no supermarkets either, shelves bursting with festive goodies – just butcher’s shops, greengrocers, corner stores and the occasional toy shop.

Britain today is a land of plenty compared to those grey days of the Fifties. The range of festive food, toys, and Christmas decorations now available and affordable to some degree by virtually everyone would have seemed like a fairytale paradise to a kid growing up in the Fifties.

This Christmas, however much you might moan about your stretched family finances, however hard-up you claim to be, I can guarantee that your home will be stuffed with more festive treats than any average youngster in the Fifties could ever have imagined.

It was in 1957 that the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously, or perhaps infamously, remarked: “You’ve never had it so good.”

For most families then, that was sheer nonsense. More recently, Lord Young, David Cameron’s adviser, was sacked for using almost identical words. But in my view, Lord Young got it right.

Today, most families have a far better standard of living than could ever have been dreamed of 50 years ago, despite the problems caused by recession.

That said, did we enjoy ourselves just as much on Christmas Day 1957, when the food and the presents were far less lavish, when life was far less complicated, and the festive fun simple?

The answer to that is a resounding “yes”.

Larkin about Angel whizz around the town. Ashford town centre Christmas lights switch on. Families gathered at the bandstand in the town centre to watch the days fun filled events, by MARTIN APPS.

Business can be brutal.

Take the case of Neill Cotton, the young ex-managing director of Silver Spring, the Folkestone-based soft drinks and mineral water enterprise.

The firm has been through turbulent times recently. After more than a century as a family-run business, it had lost its way, racking up huge losses and plunging into administration.

Cotton was a turnaround specialist with lots of relevant experience. He was hired to sort out the mess and, with others, persuaded Privet Capital to inject life-saving equity.  A controversial pre-pack administration was arranged and he became MD last September.

He cut 60 jobs at Christmas, and took other cost-cutting measures. Loss-making work was ditched and good customers were reassured that Silver Spring had a good future under new management.

New products were launched and marketing campaigns unveiled. Silver Spring - such a crucial part of the Folkestone economy - was regaining its sparkle. Cotton was planning for the long haul. He told me a few weeks ago that he had found his dream job, and aimed to double turnover in the next five years.

He had a refreshing, intelligent, open approach that seemed to bode well for the future. But it all turned sour a few weeks ago when a restructuring cost him his job, along with around 30 others. It seems he was offered a less senior role, found it impossible to accept and walked away.

No doubt the firm has its reasons. Maybe Privet was putting on pressure. But the move suggests this iconic Kentish brand, famous for pioneering flavoured water with Perfectly Clear, is still on the sick list. I hope not. I hope also that the new management is fully aware of its Kentish heritage, its importance to the Folkestone economy and jobs - generations of local people have worked there - and the importance of tapping the undoubted goodwill for this well-regarded manufacturer.

I would like to see it take more part in the Kentish scene. It could have done more to wave the flag for the county and I suspect Cotton would have been happy to do so. Everyone who depends for their income on Silver Spring’s revival will hope this latest decision, which looks harsh from the outside, helps rather than hinders its path to recovery. 

As for Cotton, who married recently, he has a lot to offer and does not deserve to be out of work too long.

NICOLE Scherzinger might sound like an exciting new KFC meal but she’s better than Cheryl Cole. In fact I liked her a lot.

She seemed genuinely horrified when the laughing gnome and the other one with the neck-stretched t-shirt mocked the contestants. She was also more effective with her criticisms unlike “I think you’ve screwed things up” Cowell. Mind you, he’d make a magnificent Prime Minister.

Nicole’s also a persuasive lady.

She made me never want to eat fish and chips again after her disparaging remarks (who feels good after eating that?) and when Louis Walsh tried to entice her with a plate of fruit, I straight away felt very protective of sweet, sweet Nicole. Leave her alone Louis.

It was the last round of auditions for the X-Factor on Saturday (ITV1, 7.30pm) and this time they were in Mad-chester.

Fortunately, being in the sun bed capital of Europe they didn’t have to worry about stuff like getting stage lights as the orange glow from the audience covered it. If you look really carefully you can see a runner shining a torch on their carroty faces.

I usually stop watching after this as all the bad people have received a good booing off stage by a man who produced the Power Rangers single. But this all changed when go-go Chloe Victoria was put through to boot camp.

She’s got a daughter called Destiny, at 19-years-old describes herself as a “yummy mummy” and has more beauty spots than Derwentwater in the Lake District.

I imagine her head is so underdeveloped that she needs all that blusher/concealer/lipstick just to build it up to normal size. It did leave an awkward side-effect though. Her left eye seemed to be struggling under the mass of her enormous eyelashes.

Of course the real reason she was put through was to add some zing to the proceedings. It definitely wasn’t on singing talent because George Gershwin would have run himself over with his piano.

Chloe Victoria was recently accused by the tabloids of being an “escort” working under the name of “Candy”. It gives a whole new significance when she tells the panel: “I just want to blow you away.” But the audience were having none of it and were soon giving her a good booing after she turned on them: “Don't be tight, this is my life.”

I imagine she’s used to it though. It’s always embarrassing having one person clapping; particularly after sex.

“I think I’m definitely what the judges are looking for, there’s no one out there like me. I act like a star, sing like a star, dance like a star, dress like a star, I’m the recipe for a star.”

A star being a colossal, luminous orb of plasma held together by safety pins and conceived by a collapsing cloud of material composed principally of crop tops and ripped jeans. Yeah, she’s that alright.

My personal highlight was leaflet-distributor Valerie Roberts who looked like the love-child of Ulrika Johnson and Yoko Ono. Google her. You’ll see.

Nevertheless, I think it’s safe to say that the country’s next Christmas number one is secure when Nicole Prescovia Elikolani Valiente Scherzinger is on the judging panel.

So keen was I to find out more that I checked her Twitter page: “I love pickles. They're delicious and sometimes when you dip them in spaghetti sauce they taste even better.”

If KFC ever do a Nicole Scherzinger meal I reckon a spaghetti-sauce-dipped pickle will be included.

Just what did Irving Berlin think he was doing when he wrote about that cussed white stuff?

Anyone in Medway faced with another dose of the seasonal deposits would argue that, far from dreaming romantically about the pleasures of a white Christmas, they should be having nightmares.

I can remember one Christmas lunch when it snowed. That was about 1955. There was another in 1962 which hung around for weeks, and left some of us marooned in the Cotswolds until February.

Oh, for the other Christmases, grey, drear, dry, or chilled sunny days with watery-thin sunsets.

As for the sleigh bells echoing across the snow? - there were milkmen delighting to wake us. Today it is more likely to be someone cursing as a large deposit silently descends on their heads as they walk past an overgrowing tree.

Irv was all for scrawling greetings on Christmas cards. Most of us leave it to our wives to send out the seasonal greetings. We're either washing and polishing the car (most Christmases), slurping a 9am sherry or (this year) digging out the car, clearing the windscreens and risking legal threats from neighbours who have slipped on the pavement so thoughtfully cleared yesterday.

Berlin might have suggested one's days should be merry and bright, but that was before the banks played with our cash, and politicians frantically tried to dig them (and the nations) out of the dark vertiginous pits of malodorous material they left.

May all your Christmases be white? Not if this weekend you are planning to drive to visit far-flung family members to deliver Christmas presents in your Vauxhall Sleigh or Ford Troika.

Anyway, not to worry, I was told the other day the council has a couple of thousand tons (or if you prefer to be politically accurate, tonnes) of road salt deposited in a secret dump as well as the topped-up heap that forms their official dump.

For those facing more mayhem, a few things are needed: one is for the gritting lorries to spread the salt a little thicker… another is for key residential roads (aka rat runs) to be opened up so that more people can get to work.

Another is for the bus companies to think about their customers like they did in the past when they were owned by the community, and remember the roads they use are the first to be gritted.

All that is now needed if for Bing Crosby (OK - Bryn Terfel if you prefer) to sing that seasoned song in its 2010 version:

I'm hating all that white snow stuff

With all those shovels full of grit

May your cars avoid being hit

And may all your Christmases be bright.