Christmas: that time we pretend to be a family again. This makes it sound bad but it isn’t – though there is always a jolt at the end. The routine is this: I turn up on the Eve, play with the children, often literally, with some kind of board game that they have, inexplicably, become attached to. (This year there were two: one geography based, at which I was terrible, and another based on the colours of, for example, company logos, at which I was also terrible.) I then go to bed on the sofa in front of a glowing fireplace, and wake up early on Christmas morning to start cooking the lunch.
Repeated experience has taught me that the best thing to do is to start at nine: that way everything will be on the table by three. Of course, this means we miss King Prince Charles’s speech, but we are not put into this world for pleasure alone. I try to hold off the wine for as long as possible but it becomes impossible to postpone the inevitable, and by 11am I am taking little sips as I prepare the (deep breath) goose, roast potatoes and parsnips, red cabbage, lentils, sprouts with lardons and croutons, stuffing (sausage meat, goose liver, celery, onion, prunes, chestnuts, breadcrumbs, sherry and an egg), pigs in blankets, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, and, at the very end, the highly stressful and time-sensitive business of making the gravy and getting everyone to sit down before anything goes cold. This is not a problem, as everyone present knows the meal will be fantastic. But not for me: I hunch over my plate, wrung out, exhausted, half-drunk, and too wired to eat. I pick at my food and listen to the merriment around me, as if from another world. No one is surprised at this any more.
Afterwards we play some more ludicrous games unless we manage to have some conversation, but everyone else is a little stunned too, so we retire to the living room in front of the fire and wait for the good telly to start. A couple of years ago it was Peter Jackson’s Beatles film, which was streaming so we didn’t have to wait for it; this time it is the new Wallace and Gromit, which we cannot watch at a time of our choosing. And by the time it comes on, I can feel sleep pressing down on my eyelids with a heavy hand, as if I am under an enchantment; try as I might, there is nothing I can do about it. Occasionally, my eyes open to catch some of the action. Through some trick of the brain, this gives me the impression I have stayed awake the whole time.
“Well, that didn’t make much sense,” I say.
“Dad, you were asleep for like almost all of it,” one or more of them will say.
For the Doctor Who Christmas special: repeat everything above from the word “occasionally” on.
Every year. The kids don’t get to see me very often these days, and when they do, they see an old man, drooling on to his chest. (They don’t see me as a blur of activity in the kitchen because I am one of those get-out-of-my-kitchen cooks, unless I need some help making the pigs in blankets.)
This year’s highlight, apart from seeing the children, was seeing the dogs – or, to be accurate, one of them. I might have mentioned that during lockdown the Ex-Wife bought a pure-bred black Labrador, for something like two months’ rent, and then one year when the door was opened to me I saw two nearly identical black Labs and I thought I was having a really weird and specific hallucination, or a stroke.
What had happened was that our neighbour from the house at the back adjoining ours had died; she was elderly and blind. This was Lionel, her guide dog, no spring chicken himself and with his own eyes beginning to mist over.
For some reason this dog is devoted to me. He follows me everywhere, but slowly, on arthritic legs. He makes a noise like a steam train going very, very slowly indeed: “Chuff.” If I am on the sofa, he will come up to me. “Chuff,” he says, and touches his nose to mine. At table, he sits between my feet; when I am cooking, he places himself next to the oven, which really isn’t convenient. I trod on his paw by mistake and, mortified, left the cooking to apologise to him; he licked my hand, as if to bestow forgiveness (and taste my hands, which must have smelled like heaven to him). At night, he lies down by the sofa with me, until his bones ache, and he goes to his own bed a few feet away.
Why me? I wonder. He only sees me once a year. Maybe he remembers my voice from over the fence when his owner was still alive – but no, he can’t do, it was too long ago. But he remembers me somehow, and then I remember Argos, who recognised his owner, Odysseus, after 20 years away, dying immediately afterwards in what I like to think was a burst of joy.
I now realise, as I type these words, that I left the family home without saying goodbye to him properly, and I feel wretched. But I am up in London again this week for my eldest’s birthday. I hope he hangs on till then.
[See also: The dawn of the anti-woke era]
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This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap