I’m a real sucker for Christmas. I still have home-made decorations, angels and hanging ornaments made by the children 35 years ago. Our old wheelbarrow, rusted and full of holes, nonetheless gets a coat of red paint each year to turn it into Father Christmas’s cart. (The reindeer that pulls it is a rocking horse with battered cardboard antlers and tinsel trappings.) Year after year I patiently tie cotton loops to Quality Street toffees and hang them on a silvered, now rather shabby, branch. It all takes hours.
I love everything about Christmas: stirring the pud, icing the cake, cutting the holly. When we were children we had a ritual annual outing to see Selfridges’ Christmas window displays and the lights in Regent Street. These are never as good as they were all those years ago.
But Christmas memories are not all jingle bells and champagne. My earliest is of making a Christmas cake at school and producing it for Christmas Day tea. I was very proud of my work of art — the three kings painted in food dyes on the smooth royal icing. But I’d failed to add any glycerine and the icing set like concrete. My Dad split the ivory handle of my mother’s best knife by holding it like a chisel and hitting it with a hammer. That didn’t work and we had to scoop the cake out from the underside, leaving the rock-like icing bowl.
One Christmas, when I’d got my first room of my own, a bedsitter in Earl’s Court, I set the place on fire with real candles on a tiny Christmas tree. The net curtains blew across it when I opened the window to let out the smell of burning roast parsnips.
But most Christmas memories are set in the past 40-odd years in the same house, with the same cast.
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