The vandalism of Scrooge's gravestone could be a hate crime, says columnist Toby Neal
"I wish it could be Christmas every day" - so spoke the great Brummie prophet Roy Wood.
And so it came to pass.
It's not even December until tomorrow and the great modern secular festival has already been interminable.
Until the culprits are detected, we cannot know the motive of the person or persons who smashed up Scrooge's grave in Shrewsbury, but we can surmise that it was a targeted attack, rather than random vandalism.
As such it can be classed as a hate crime. But hatred of what? Dickens' Scrooge was famously devoid of Christmas cheer, a miserly grump.
"Every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart," he declares.
In a world in which celebrating diversity should surely include celebrating a diversity of views, such an opinion should be respected. But the Christmas Carol story was written in unenlightened times and that Victorian reactionary Charles Dickens clearly felt that Scrooge was a wrong 'un who needed a touch of redemption.
