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.