Christmas Day ... of the Dead!

Photo by Miyaoka Hitchcock under Creative Commons licence

"Do I write a blog, or go online as Captain Beefgun and spend the next 16 hours on a zombie kill kill faster faster shotgun-fest?"

Let's start with two apologies.

The first was the temporary death of my modem in Casa de Mat.

Despite a two-hour call of bad advice and misinformation from an Indian call centre, I breathed life anew in to it. That was Saturday lunchtime.

The second apology follows the first: why no blog until late Sunday?

It was zombies, you see.

Imagine it: you've done the impossible by making a modem work through sheer will power.

To celebrate, you go to the shop for a pastie.

On your way home you pass a computer game shop.

You pop in, pick up a few games, read their descriptions and browse the goods.

Then you see a box with a dismembered four-fingered hand on a green cover and the title Left 4 Dead written in blood.

Some genius has created a new game in the style of a zombie film that sees you logging on to the interweb and blowing away hordes of the undead.

So it's not surprising you leave the store with said game and a telling off for eating food on the premises.

Now, when I get home do I write a blog, or go online under the pseudonym of Captain Beefgun and spend the next 16 hours on a zombie kill kill faster faster shotgun-fest?

Which brings us to a third apology. HCC is all about Christmas, nothing more, nothing less.

And this week I was going to write about the harm Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz has done our carpets since year dot.

For that, tune in next week. This week it's zombies. Don't worry, they are relevant to Christmas.

George A Romero satirised capitalism in Dawn of the Dead with shopping mall-plauging zombies.

Charlie Brooker resurrected this idea in the recent Dead Set by imagining a Big Brother audience as a mass of braindead scum.

And is not Christmas the time your brain dribbles out of your ears and eyes from overexposure to that advert with the jingle "Holidays are coming" and "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas"?

Shoppers hand over their credit cards in exchange for £4.99 brain teasers, the 2009 AA road map and other stocking fillers.

Pure brown crap swamps our TV sets in the form of X-Factor and Timmy Mallet bullying Robert Kilroy-Silk on I'm A Celebrity.

It is only a matter of time before someone welds makes a truly great zombie apocalypse Christmas film.

Next: Blame Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz