Christmas at home

For thirty-three years I travelled to Liverpool for Christmas. No matter how desperately I wanted to spend it with the latest boyfriend, no matter how broke I was and how expensive the train ticket, no matter what tempting invitations came my way to spend the festive season on the beach in Goa, or on the Alpine ski slopes, I had to go home. My parents expected little of me overall, but they did expect my company at Christmas. The one Christmas I didn't make the trip, being seven months gone with a secret pregnancy, my mother made such a fuss about how badly I'd let her and my father down ("She has a whole year to do what she wants in, so you'd think she could spare us just this one day..."etc. etc.) that my sister eventually spilled the beans, precipitating such a run of knock-on effects that the course of my life was irredeemably changed.

For the last eleven years, since my mother died in 1996, Christmas has been a blank in my calendar. The first one following her death (Dad had died four years earlier), I drowned my sorrows with friends in Cornwall. The second, and all the subsequent ones have been spent at the home of my current partner. Now that he is recovering from his two strokes (both different types of stroke, both in one day, who says lightning never strikes in the same place twice?), it would seem heartless to abandon him to his solitary turkey and take to the beach or the ski slopes. And anyway, he's jolly good fun.

At heart, most of us are creatures of habit and when fate creates a vacuum we rapidly fill it with another habit, another duty. This makes us feel good and safe, warm and fuzzy and though it may give us a few grumbles, looking back on it can also be a source of laughter and give us a sense of continuity, making us feel that we are still connected to others, even if our immediate family is gone. Here's to you, Mum and Dad. Merry Christmas!