POOH, bah and fiddlesticks. It's a tough job, and one which will not make me any friends (which suggests of course, that I could have some friends) but business is business already.

So here we go: E Scrooge Esq was a very fine fellow and the bad press he has been given this past155 years is a sinister plot by the tabloids to undermine the British entrepreneurial spirit.

Bob Cratchett was a whining wimp. His son, Tiny Tim, was not a helpless cripple but a juvenile delinquent who had caught his leg in the window when burglarising the local chemist's shop for his daily fix of laudanum.

This, as students of Victorian melodrama will know, was a cough mixture whose main ingredient was opium.

Who says so? This guy who came to me in my sleep the other night and offered me five golden guineas to do a PR makeover on poor old Ebenezer to make up for the hatchet job that notorious hack, Charles Dickens, did on him in 1843.

Some dream, I thought, waking up in a sweat. Yet there, gleaming on the bedside table, was a small pile of the aforesaid guineas.

These, I should explain to the kiddywinks, were worth £1.1s.0d in early Victorian times, which means £1.05p in today's monopoly money. But they were pure gold all the way through and at today's prices are worth more than a few bob.

(A bob, I should also explain, was a shilling, or 12 pennies, which is now represented by that miniature 5p coin that looks like a shirt button and is of absolutely no value whatsoever).

So, a contract is a contract. How do I explain to the unenlightened masses that Mr Scrooge, described by that cad Dickens as "a grasping old sinner," was in fact a whizz-kid businessman with his eyes on the future?

For a start, he should have sacked the Cratchett wimp yonks ago and replaced him with a computer. Then, with the family on the dole, Tiny Tim could have drawn social security benefits to feed his opium habit.

And all that business about starving the Cratchett family at Christmas time until he was haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past was, in fact, an astute bargaining position which allowed our hero, ES, to trash the opposition.

You see, he knew that, if he held out in making his purchases until the last moment on Christmas Eve, he could hit the Christmas sales with his plastic and therefore not only get a bargain but, by paying off his card bill as soon as it arrived, an interest-free bargain at that.

Now there's forward planning for you. It was thinking like that which made Britain's Victorian mine and mill owners the envy of the capitalist world. So a few poor guys and their families got junked: someone has to pay the price of progress when there's an Empire to build.

And in the end, Cratchett and his family got their goose and I hope they enjoyed it: too fatty for me, I'm afraid.

So ES was, when it came to the crunch, just a soft-hearted old sentimentalist. Happy Christmas.

Memo to Ghost: Will this do? I'll re-write if you like but please, please, don't come back to haunt me. It makes Mrs C very cross.

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.