Status Anxiety: Pinteresque festivities of yesteryear

My father was a big believer in Christmas. That is to say, he liked the idea of it. My sister and I were the products of his second marriage and he would usually invite the children of his first marriage to our house for lunch. It could be quite tense, with undercurrents of rivalry and resentment, but all the children made an effort to keep the atmosphere festive. It was if we were characters in a play by Harold Pinter pretending to be characters in a Morecombe and Wise Christmas special. We did this to protect our father’s feelings, I think. He was the opposite of a paterfamilias. His strategy for holding the family together was to cast himself as the most emotionally vulnerable member. He knew that we’d pretend to get along in order to avoid upsetting him.

My father, who died in 2002, was a left-wing intellectual who helped set up a number of institutions that are still with us today: the Open University, Which magazine, the Consumers’ Association, the University of the Third Age and the School for Social Entrepreneurs, among others. He was also a genuine eccentric. On the eve of a trip to Australia once he told me about a brilliant wheeze he’d come up with to minimise the amount of luggage he took with him. It involved wearing two of everything in transit. Sure enough, he’d prepared for the 18-hour flight by putting on two pairs of socks, two shirts, two suits, etc.

My father would nearly always invite, in addition to all his children, a variety of waifs and strays to Christmas lunch. For instance, there was Vincent Brome, an elderly literary gentleman whose main topic of conversation was sex.