On Monday I made the gravely ill-advised decision to play football. It was the now-annual resurrection of a game we started playing every Saturday fifteen years ago, a group of dads with our kids and their friends, then aged five. Over the years, the game embraced a changing cast of boys, girls and parents, some …
Around Christmas, time is strange. We go to bed late. We get up early because, despite the absence of work, there is still way too much work to do. Even the days of the week cease to have meaning. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday give way to Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, as time …
Last year at my house, my partner Susie was away at the exact moment in December when we normally get the tree. Now there are those who would regard this as a golden opportunity to take back control of Christmas - choose, install and decorate the tree in a quasi-military operation; no discussion, no arguments, …
I am feeling young today. But it is not because I have a youthful spring in my step. Nor am I dazzled by the heady possibilities of a world yet unexplored, the rich potential of a life yet to be lived. No. I am feeling young like a naughty schoolboy: it’s the end of term …
Good morning, Paddy, and a happy Boxing Day to you all. I’m delighted to meet you although, to be honest, the circumstances could be better. I’d really rather be in bed right now and yet, somehow, here I am, like Good King Wenceslaus, looking out on the Feast of Stephen. The trouble with the day …
I was eating a piece of cheese the other night, late on in the kitchen, alone after clearing the Christmas decks. Cheese is the thing that comes out when you know you've had enough but even so your eyes light up and before you know it you're half a pound of stilton to the good …
Christmas makes me feel a little vulnerable: the pressure to get it right; the sheer, spiraling cost of it; the need for everyone to be jolly. What if I fail? It makes me want to run away. I went for a run recently, in the countryside, and found myself in a field where, in the …
We watch movies in our house, and they enter our language. Crying, for example, is known as ‘Going a bit Sound of Music’ after my habit of weeping uncontrollably whenever Captain Von Trapp sings Edelweiss. The key Christmas movie, though, is It’s A Wonderful Life, which was released seventy years ago this week. Jimmy Stewart …
There’s a lot of new stuff around our houses at Christmas. New clothes, new toys, new smells, new novelty foodstuffs, and yet somehow, a couple of days later the place contrives to feel weary and old and hungover. So I’ve been doing the laundry. Yesterday, I did six loads of washing, clean, dried, folded and …