”Strange how potent cheap music is,” muses Amanda in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. How perfectly this encapsulates the way I feel the first time I hear Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” – usually around the start of Advent and probably in a department store when I’ve ventured into “the city” (as Norwich is known around these parts) in an attempt to beat the crowds.
Now I appreciate that I might be alone in feeling slightly warm, fuzzy and excited, even a bit misty-eyed when Noddy Holder asks if you’re “hanging up your stocking on the wall” (who actually does that? – it’s the end of the bed in our house), but stay with me.
