I HAVE to blame someone, so I’m going to blame Roy Wood.

The extravagantly hair-styled leader of early 1970s glam rock titans Wizzard has ensured himself a tiny piece of immortality – and a regular flow of royalties – by dint of having penned the song I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day.

Marginally less annoying and brutish than Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody (incidentally from the same year, 1973, surely the annus mirabilis for festive songs), Wood’s ditty has I fear, helped produce an incredibly annoying side effect.

While no one – surely? – wishes it were Christmas every day, it seems these days that there are plenty who believe it should be Christmas from around the middle of November.

There have always been the festive diehards who insist on a visual run-in to Christmas that starts six or seven weeks before December 25, those lonely outposts of twinkling lights that appear in windows with the smell of cordite from Bonfire Night barely gone from the chill evening air.

But this practice appears to be getting increasingly popular. I think November 13 this year was the earliest day on which I caught a glimpse of undeniably Yuletide decorations adorning a window – of a house in Newport, the location of which I will not disclose to save the owner’s blushes.

But with several days still to go to the end of November there were a clutch of them, more than I’d ever seen before at that time of year.

Now, the practice for city and town centres is to switch on their Christmas lights early in the second half of November, which again has always seemed a little premature to me, though it might be argued that it is in all of our interests for retailers to generate a longer and higher spending period to boost the economy, etc. etc.

It is all too easy to imagine chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne in a Santa hat, exhorting superstores and independent traders alike to go early on the festive stuff to help get the deficit down.

But more and more households are following suit and I’m sorry, but it is a little ridiculous.

There are now 19 days to go until Christmas and I’m still not inclined to fetch the ladder and venture into the murky recesses of the Weekender Towers loft to bring down the decorations, or go out to choose a tree.

That is next weekend’s job, when there are less than two weeks to go until Christmas and I’m actually beginning to feel a bit festive.

Back to songs again, and the considerably more ancient The 12 Days of Christmas offers a clue as to where that festive feeling ought to reside – right at the heart of the celebration itself.

Of course, in the modern world, we need some lead-in time, to work ourselves up into a frenzy over present-buying, agonise over who to invite for Christmas dinner, moan about the fact that we’ve invited too many people and the oven isn’t big enough for the turkey, and so on.

With all that important stuff to ponder, more people appear to have decided that sticking up the decorations early gets an unavoidable chore out of the way, so they can concentrate on other unavoidable chores.

For me, putting up the tree and stringing up the lights is the real start of the Christmas countdown, and the shorter that countdown, the better.I remember as a wide-eyed nine-year-old, watching Roy Wood whooping it up on Top of the Pops. Perhaps then, I wished it could be Christmas every day.

At the risk of coming across all “bah, humbug” and frightfully 21st Century, nowadays I would consider that prospect to be some sort of breach of my human rights.

Newport city centre needs help NOW

THE ‘yes’ vote by 88 per cent of eligible businesses in Newport for a Business Improvement District (BID) to be set up should be seen as a positive step in efforts to improve the city.

Businesses that are part of the scheme will pay a levy which can be used for initiatives such as improving security, increasing footfall, and to try to improve the range of shops and food outlets.

Alan Edwards, the chairman of Newport NOW - the BID title - put his finger on the current problem when he said: “Businesses need people to stay in the city centre for a long time. What I feel has happened is people have been in for short stays, for banks, building societies, insurance, and because of the lack of shop offer they don’t stay long.”

Increasingly, that has been my experience for the past four or five years and sadly, I am sure I am far from alone. There is simply too little to keep sufficient people in the city centre long enough for it to thrive.

Friars Walk will, of course, help to change that. But Newport needs its existing shops and businesses, and more of an independent retail sector, to complement the new shopping centre.

BID supporters have shown they are prepared to invest in Newport’s future, and hopefully that will help to reverse the negativity that has held sway for too long.