A chance to look backwards, and forwards, and see where you are

To Edinburgh for Christmas this year, and I can’t wait. We’ll be leaving any day now, in our pathetic London squib of a car. You know the sort — it’s got a fuel tank the size of a milk carton and on the motorway it sounds like a bee. It never feels pathetic in London, because we use it once a fortnight and drive at 15mph. Up north, though, you can feel people looking at you askance. I mean, they never say anything, but you know what they’re thinking. ‘You’re professional, grown-up people,’ say their eyes, ‘and you have a family car with an engine smaller than that of my toddler’s dirt bike. How pretentious.’

My toddler doesn’t have a dirt bike, because our London garden isn’t big enough to have any dirt. A couple of my Scottish friends have just bought a couple of sheep to put into theirs. It’s funny to think of the time you spend in your twenties, studying your peer group and trying to force your own exceptionalism to take root. And then, in your thirties, after the kids come, you stop concentrating, and it happens all by itself. Probably for everybody.

Anyway. We’ll pile them into the car, the toddler and the other one, probably at about 5 p.m. Then we’ll buzz off up the motorway while they sleep, getting into my parents’ place outside Edinburgh by about midnight. They’re buying a tree, my parents, possibly their first. They are Jewish, after all. And, indeed, so am I, but the kids aren’t. My mum keeps sending me these polite text messages, wondering how tall it should be, and what, roughly, she ought to be hanging on it. I tend to pass them on to my wife. Being German, she’s all over that stuff. You know where you are with German festive decorations; there are rules. A couple of months ago, when autumn started, my father-in-law turned up with a basket full of decorative gourds for us to put on our window-sills.

‘Why are we putting decorative gourds on our window-sills?’ I asked my wife.

‘Because it is autumn,’ she said, brightly. And with finality, so I left it at that. Christmas decorations are equally inexplicable; men made of figs and wooden birds and suchlike, but they’re the same sort of inexplicable every year so I’ve long since given up worrying about it.

On Christmas Eve, in Edinburgh, I’ll possibly go to the Halfway House. It’s a tiny pub, just up some steps from Waverley Station, and I’ve been meeting many of the same friends there most Christmas Eves for the best part of two decades. We used to joke about the way we’d all lose touch over the years; move to Africa, make it in Hollywood, serve time in Thai jails and suchlike, but still find ourselves wandering back in there once a year to see who is still alive.

Life doesn’t work like that, obviously. The years become short, not long, and phones and Facebook mean you only really lose touch with the people you want to. Still, there’s always the chance you’ve forgotten about someone. I’ll be there in my London wanker clothes, and the guy with the sheep will be wearing wellies and a Barbour. Maybe I’ll see him there in 30 years’ time. ‘But you’re supposed to be wearing wellies and a Barbour!’ I’ll tell him, shocked, if he isn’t. ‘Those are the rules!’

This is what I like about Christmas. I’ve written a bit, this year, about the stuff we hold on to. The stuff that, despite the whole Godless, soulless, iPhone-worshipping, never-meet-your-neighbours, steal-Wi-Fi-whenever-you-can direction this country is going in, still survives and lingers on. The Christmas period is that all over. I mean, sure, there’s the Jesus thing, too, and I wouldn’t want to diminish that for those to whom it matters. Probably my wife will take the kids down the road to the village church I don’t think I’ve ever been inside. But I hope that’s still happening in a decade or so too, because it’s basically the same thing. That’s what this is. It’s a time when the fog clears, and you get the chance to look backwards, and forwards, and see where you are.

If we get that far, of course. The world, remember, is ending on 21 December. According to Wikipedia, ‘This date, called “4-Ajau, God 9 of the Night, 3-Kank’in, Year Bearer 1-Kaban”, is regarded as the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Meso-american Long Count calendar.’ Because a handful of extinct Mayans can’t be wrong, can they? There’s a page on the Nasa website entitled ‘Beyond 2012: Why the World Won’t End’ though, so provided you trust science and scientists — as all sensible people do — you really don’t have much to worry about.

What’s been bugging me, though, is a sense of apocalypse for predictions of the apocalypse. Time was, you see, that some lunatic’s prediction of the endtimes cropped up almost every other year. They seem to be tailing off, though. I mean, sure, there are always people who think we’re going to run out of food, fuel and oxygen, and have to spend our last days eating each other while wearing anoraks with holes in them. But — after this week — there’s a notable dearth of medieval monks, nuns, Assyrian tablets, foaming witches from Yorkshire, etc, who are willing to put a date to it. Maybe we’ve grown out of it. Or they’re right.