Christmas Attempted: Driving Home for Christmas

December 24th

I am bombing down the M5 at 100mph with a cheeseburger in one hand. My friends, this is what we fought Hitler for.

We have just dropped one of the kids home for Christmas, leaving him to grin at his mother with his newly pierced lip and nose accessories. Me and my manager leg it to the car as the sounds of screaming and broken glass ring out behind us. He's not our problem anymore.

We are near Birmingham and it's 4 o'clock. My manager orders me to get home for 8 o'clock, so that he can see his lover. It seems my job this Christmas is to convey other people to their private joys. So be it.

I drive aggressively, picturing Slade, Wizard and Shakin Stevens trying to escape me as I run them down and grind their bones to a bloody pulp. My manager grabs the volume dial every time the Pogues come on, and we both squeal out hearts out. It passes the time.

The plan was to stay at a bed and breakfast in Birmingham and drive home tomorrow, but clearly my manager would rather spend the night in the waxed and manicured arms of his lover than drinking Jack Daniels with a depressed writer with a tragic-hero complex.

And so I race through the Christmas Eve night, blinking to keep my contact lenses moist and in place. We would have left Birmingham a lot earlier, but the kid attacked us when we tried to put tinsel on rear windscreen wiper, so we had to waste an hour writing an incident report.

We squeeze the season for joy as we squeeze the kids for triumph. Both tasks are thankless.

It is 8.30 when we pull up in Truro. My manager invites me to the pub to meet his lover. I agree, and spend the next hour in awe. His lover is a cliche of a man, everything that you see in the movies and American sitcoms. He sneers after every sentence; he discusses the dress sense
of celebrities; he hates kids; and he drinks a giant red cocktail afloat with a small patch of the Amazon rainforest.

Life imitating art? Would such power be mine? I down my drink and smash it over the head of a passing mermaid.


It's 10.30 when I get home. One and a half hours till the day of muses. My housemate has left to go home to her family. The house is dark and empty.

I sit down on the sofa and stare at the wall.

Christmas Attempted. I could have got back to my family. I could have gone with my housemate to hers. I could have accepted one of the invites I had and spent this night in someone's company.

But I chose not to. Self-inflicted, I sit by the empty Christmas tree as carols resound in the neon night.

One day I will share these things with the girl I love. But for now I give my thoughts to Jesus. May he bless every moment that I have witnessed, and shelter every person I have held. You saved this world, in all its glory and its wretchedness. You saved every moment of pain that I have felt, and I thank you for that.


Merry Christmas one and all. I am thinking of you always.