Oral sex is always an acceptable last-minute gift idea, considering that a wodge of dope is still illegal.

There’s a lot more oral sex around these days, which I put down to most homes now having showers and the Pope being a busted flush.
This raises the connection between Xmas and the “pro-life” crazies.
Jesus never said a bad word about abortion. He could have if he’d wanted to. Obviously, he was pro-choice.
Hot Press readers will know from verbatim recall of Matthew 25 that Jesus was upfront with rules for right living to get you to heaven. Likewise warnings against evils that would plummet you into hell.
“For I was an hungred, and yee gaue me meate: I was thirstie, and ye gaue me drinke: I was a stranger, and ye tooke me in…” etc. The King James version is your only man.
Share and share alike and care for everybody in need. That’s the ticket to paradise.
But: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drinke…”
Act like you believe benefit cuts are the answer and you’ll howl unheard in hell forever. No mention of abortion. Jesus would have been with the ULA.
Jesus must have had a piquant perspective on a woman’s right to choose. Other things apart – and we will come to them – he was one of a particular sub-set of deities. A lonely enough station I imagine, especially on birthdays.
When it came to gods born to virgins on December 25, there was only himself, the Persian Mithras, the two Egyptians, Horus and Osiris, the Greek Apollo, the Roman Bacchus (aka Dionysus) and a couple of nondescript others around at the time. I fancy they will have hung out together, having something special in common that nobody else could ever hope to understand. Members of boy bands must feel the same angst.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
Jesus was fully human, developed in the womb and bawled his way into the world like any of the rest of us. But it logically follows from the fact his mum was a virgin that his development hadn’t begun with a male sperm penetrating a female ovum to form a zygote. Instead, the zygote genetically coded to become Jesus appeared fully formed, so to speak, attached to the wall of Mary’s womb. Mary was a surrogate mum, Jesus a “test-tube baby”. (The implication for Church teaching on these topics is plain. Not that the plain truth is likely to affect the pronouncements of the patriarchate’s grand panjandrums.)
This understanding of the incarnation stemmed from the way people two millennia ago understood conception to come about. It was assumed that human life began when a minuscule person-to-be was injected into the woman by the man during intercourse. This matched a belief that women’s role in society was passively to carry and painfully to bring to life what men produced and continued to own.
Against the background of this belief, the notion of God magicking a speck-sized human into a woman’s body will not have seemed as self-evidently ridiculous as it does today to all but the irredeemably daft.
Thus, the idea of a woman having a right to refuse the use of her body for the purpose of procreation, even to effect the removal of what maleness had deposited within her, directly challenged the fundamental philosophical assumptions on which society was based, particularly in relation to the role and rights of women.
Scientific understanding of these matters may have advanced in the meantime. But the surrounding ethical and political circumstances haven’t changed at all. The denial of a woman’s right to choose remains the linchpin of male domination.
Xmas is an appropriate time to ponder these matters – this year more than most, in the immediate aftermath of the emergence of a case in which the irrefutable argument for a women’s right to choose has been made flesh.
 Which brings us back to the most pitch-perfect moment of 2012 – Patti Smith tilting her head to the mic at the Picnic in September and beginning: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine…”
Moments to fetch out from the memory to savour as and when.
Which reminds me in turn that the other sure-fire gift this Xmas is a Soak EP.
Soak is a bundle of impossible brilliance. She’ll be tilting the heads of the whole world soon. She writes songs full of the ache of innocence and the wisdom of ages. She has a voice than can cartwheel across octaves, glide through the keys, soft-click the chord changes. Her lyrics are elusive, beguiling, redolent of love and loss and soft resilience.
“They don’t know what love is/ Throw it around like it was worthless.” That’s the best line written in Ireland in 2012.
She recorded ‘Trains’ back in February, ‘Sea Creatures’ in June. A fiver each. You might think that a bit stingy for Xmas. But what you’d bestow is a chance to feel just the coolest when everybody asks sooner than you think if you’ve heard this Soak… Money wouldn’t buy you this sort of cred.
“Remember when we were everything,” she sings on ‘Fingers Crossed’.
She is a harbinger, an omen, a herald-angel to hearten the hardening times, funny, sweet, beautiful, seemingly ineffably shy, takes no shit from anybody. Gift-rapped genius.