The best family Christmas I ever had was with another family. I mean, my family were there too – some of them. But they weren’t the highlight.
The highlight was watching my 93-year-old, home counties, tweed skirt, dry-sherry-and-the-Daily-Express grandmother get passively stoned while talking to a semi-professional gambler by the name of Lamb Chop.
What did these two unlikely tablemates have in common? Well, Lamb Chop had made his living almost entirely from betting on horses, while my grandfather had been a horse vet and owner. And so, under the strings of Christmas cards, beside a roaring fire, with the strains of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home in the background, these two kept up a stream of conversation for about five hours. Derby winners. Flat form. Trainers. Stables. Jockey weight. Grand National hopefuls. Until you have watched a woman in an elasticated girdle and a blue rinse discuss Lester Piggott’s storm to victory on The Minstrel in the 1977 Epsom Derby with a man smoking a roll-up the approximate size of a parsnip, then frankly, I don’t think you’ve celebrated Christmas.
For years, my Christmases had been spent in a flat, untouristy corner of north Shropshire, at my granny’s house. We’d watch the telly, eat off a special hostess trolley, put our pyjamas on in front of an electric fire and then watch a bit more telly for good measure. That house is still one of only two in the whole world that I can walk through entirely in my memory: the horse pictures up the stairs, the pink bathroom with my grandfather’s old moustache comb, a cupboard under the stairs full of boot polish and binoculars and shoehorns. It is etched into me like DNA.
When my grandmother got too old to host, we were incredibly lucky to get invited to the home of some friends of my mum’s, who lived in a nearby town. They were as exotic and glamorous as my family were potato-shaped. They’d lived in Kerala, used melted lead to tell fortunes, drank whisky, read a dazzling array of books, ate pink grapefruit for breakfast and shone with a kind of golden light, even when the weather outside looked like a rotten flannel.
At Christmas, they gathered together an unlikely and often chaotic array of guests. In that house, I played Scrabble with a Jewish refugee who came to England in the 1930s, played Dream Phone with a grey-haired academic, ate muesli beside a photographer from Delhi, sewed up the broken zip on a tent with a paramedic and listened to stories of shark fishing in Achill, Ireland, beside an interior designer in pink trousers.
That initial Christmas, spent around a huge table littered with wine glasses, dictionaries, ashtrays, photographs, miniature elephants, red cabbage and knitting – listening to my chain-smoking granny crackle out a commentary on the 1973 Cheltenham Champion Hurdle prospects of Comedy of Errors in a voice so low people always mistook her on the phone for a man – was the first time I really got Christmas. Started to enjoy it. Actively looked forward to it. That family, who weren’t actually my family, showed me what Christmas was about. They were the children of refugees and hunt balls; they went to church and stayed up drinking until 3am; they wore jeans and had gold rings, and somehow that combination made them welcoming to all. They visited my granny, in her care home, until the day she died.
I used to think that the ingredients for a good Christmas were a bulging stocking, a loud television, lots of food and a scattering of dog hair on the carpet. But that Christmas I learned that a couple of glasses of sherry, thick blue smoke and a hazy chat about the latest fixture at Kempton Park can go a long way, too.
