“It is with a very heavy heart,” then prime minister Boris Johnson told a press conference one Saturday four years ago, “I must tell you we cannot continue with Christmas as planned.” With the festive season just days away, and much of the country about to start moving about, Covid restrictions were to tighten again.
But the new restrictions would not come into force until midnight. That gave everyone nearly eight hours to get out of dodge before they’d technically be breaking the rules. And so many did, bringing forward travel plans, piling onto trains which were very possibly plague-ridden.
Within three hours, tickets on many train lines had sold out, and health secretary Matt Hancock was calling those opting to travel as the virus spiked again “totally irresponsible”. But they were following the letter, if not the spirit, of the law, and the prime minister, not a natural Oliver Cromwell figure, had presumably known this. If he’d really wanted to stop everyone, the restrictions would have been immediate.
After all, travelling home for Christmas is, for many, an annual ritual – and as foolish as it may have been, it felt especially needed that year. One of the side effects of the over-centralised nature of the British economy is that, every year around midwinter’s day, London hollows out. Most of the time, the city sucks in people from the length and breadth of these islands and beyond. But for one week every year, many of them leave again, leaving the metropolis to the tourists and the locals.
The idea of Christmas is so bound up with the idea of a journey home that I have sometimes (though not in 2020) found myself jealous of those who have to make it. It’s the subject of Christmas films, like the B-plot in Home Alone, or the many Hallmark films in which career women discover that everything they ever wanted is actually to be found in one lumberjack-shaped package back in their small, rural town. It’s the topic of songs, too, at least one of which is quite good (even if, when you think about where Chris Rea is actually from, it turns out to be a song about the experience of a traffic jam on the A1(M)).
And it’s something that has, by virtue of having grown up near a tube station, been largely denied to me. Those first few years in my twenties, sharing a house in Southwark with friends, I tried to get excited about the journey home for Christmas – but a brief stint on the 42 bus followed by 20 minutes on a train out of Liverpool Street was missing something, somehow. In later years, I’ve sometimes not even had that, and a Christmas in which you can be fed elsewhere, even as you wake up and return to your own bed, gets top marks for convenience but scores poorly on romance.
Last year, though, I did go home; I returned to my mother’s house, where I spent my adolescence, for an entire week. I was six months out from my bereavement, and almost everyone had told me how Christmas would be the hardest thing of all. But they were wrong. After that year and that loss, there was something deeply comforting about returning to the familiarity of the life my mother and stepfather had built together. The drinks in the local, and walks through familiar streets. The visits from family friends I see rarely and don’t know especially well. My stepfather snoring softly in front of the television, occasionally jerking awake to ask, “Who’s that?”. There was a newfound understanding that, whatever had happened, however old I was, I was still lucky enough to have a home there to go back to.
I’m doing it again this year. And despite being even older, I can’t wait. When you find yourself crammed onto another overcrowded train going north, or when your uncle starts talking up Nigel Farage again, perhaps remember not everyone has a family to return to every year. Those of us who do should never take it for granted.
[See also: Richard Curtis’s Christmas carol]
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