Christmas by Andrew Shephard
It’s coming up to Christmas, a drama whose cast and location has changed completely, several times, in my life. When you form an important relationship or get married, or have children, or lose a loved one, the form which Christmas will take can be a source of inner and outer conflict, a feeling that what is proposed is somehow not quite as Christmas should be. Our idea of what Christmas should be is formed when we are very young, created from those first remembered gatherings of our own peculiar tribe, when food was unusually varied and plentiful, when bedtimes were not enforced, when games were played, when brightly coloured pop was drunk, and when the grown-ups were a lot less serious than usual. This is me aged three and a half, on the first Christmas Day I can recall. I am in the back yard of my grandparents’ house in Mitcham, proudly showing my presents to the Brownie camera - a tricycle and a bus conductor’s outfit. My parents had lived with my grandparents when they were...