The weather outside was frightful. Thick fog bearhugged the A40. We were in a car somewhere outside Oxford on Christmas Eve, although we could have been ticks inside the fleece of an unshorn sheep for all I could see outside the windscreen.
I hadn’t learned to drive until my early thirties. With the ink on my pass certificate still drying, one obvious idea had come to me and my partner Helena: this year, we had the freedom to drive around to see everybody in our families. No need to risk the stress of the delay-ridden train gauntlet, or to squeeze ourselves and everyone’s gifts onto National Express buses, like human Buckaroos. Christmas was saved!
Call me green, but Christmastime driving is one of the most stressful things I’ve ever willingly put myself through. Nobody on the roads seems to want to be there. Perhaps a more seasoned driver would relish the reflex challenge of an Audi, brake lights ablaze, materialising out of nowhere through the fog in front of you, or of wresting control back after hitting the strange weightlessness of the car on black ice. But to me, Swindon Drift somehow lacks the requisite mystique of a Fast and Furious franchise instalment.
Christmas at home comes with far more challenges than heading abroad
(Paul Stafford)
By the time we arrived at our first stop, I discovered that the body does fun things when extremely tense for a few hours. And by fun, I of course mean weird. The blood vessels beneath my right eye were doing the rumba and my belly had just finished a Whirling Dervish. Starting off at that level of stress doesn’t equate to a relaxing family time.
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Our arrival signalled the emergence of “the box,” which is always kept in the garage, filled with crisps, fancy biscuits wrapped in foil and continental raisin- or marzipan-based cakes that nobody eats at any other time of the year (and which my parents always inexplicably keep strictly off-limits until Christmas Eve). You know the forced festive fun is in full flow when you’re covered in dusty stollen sugar. And yet I had no appetite, knowing that I’d offered to drive Helena to her sister’s that evening, then come back to my parents’ house. Two hours each way? In that Valhalla?
There’s nothing worse than waking up on Christmas morning with a belly full of regret (and a head full of hangover)
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