The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past

The past shifts about like clouds, now dense, now parting for a memory to shine out, perhaps randomly, but bright as the sun.

Here is the Sheffield Christmas when I was four and slept in Great-Aunt Florence’s room, on an eiderdown beside her bed, in the terraced house that smelled of coal smoke — the Christmas of worrying about how dirty Santa must get, going up and down the sooty chimneys.