I like remembering Christmases, even the bad ones. Most of the good ones have disappeared into nothingness. You learn something from the bad ones, hopefully, though often nothing from the good ones.
Perhaps it’s our natural state to suffer. Certainly most of the world has a crummy, distressed Christmas.
One year a transitional girlfriend of mine gave me a pound a day for the whole holiday period, starting off with Christmas Eve and ending on New Year’s Day. And the keys to her flat. She would be away with family in their bourgeois home. There was only one proviso: no wild sex, drink and drug parties.
It was the greatest of Christmases up ’til then. Twenty-one troubled Noëls, and now this yuletide oasis. No fights. No privation. No cramped, sweaty hours before a gas fire in the front room, watching interminable inanities on the telly. There was only a radio in my girlfriend’s flat. It snowed. And everywhere was soft and quiet. A winterous landscape.
The old part of Edinburgh I was staying in was more 18th century, older than even Dickens. I felt that I’d fallen into a time before the Industrial Revolution. I listened to Radio 3 , which seemed to echo this time before modern life. The BBC used to be good at conjuring up time travel; perhaps that’s why they invented Doctor Who, to help with their time-travelling escapades.
That Christmas I met Gordon Roddick for the first time at Paddy’s Bar on Rose Street, where I spent most of my pound a day allowance. We spent Christmas Day drinking together. That was the unusual and brilliant thing about a Scottish Christmas: it didn’t really exist. In fact, Christmas back then wasn’t a holiday; festivities were all loaded on to New Year’s Day when Scotland seemed to explode in goodwill and sociable whisky.