Tonight:
5°c
Good luck to all you BA ticket-bearing Londoners whose Christmas travels were saved by the High Court last week.
Commiserations to the festive Eurostar riders whose fates were sealed by the curious incident of the condensation in the Chunnel. And to the rest of you braving the frozen tundra beyond Zone Six for Christmas Day, I wish you well. We smug stay-at-homes applaud your fortitude but increasingly decline to join you.
TS Eliot, who wrote “The journey, not the arrival, matters”, had clearly never spent Christmas Eve travelling home to Lancashire on the M6. Hilton Park, Charnock Richards, Keele, Knutsford, Sandbach — I've crawled past you all in freezing fog, once taking a record nine hours to do so.
After that I began treating myself to the hedonism of New Year's Eve in Goa, though the price to pay was 10 hours cooped up in the cattle truck that is Monarch Airways. Marriage and children put paid to such indulgences and once my parents were gone, and with the in-laws usually abroad, we found ourselves surprisingly free.
That first Christmas after Mum and Dad died, the compulsion was to go somewhere, anywhere, and we ended up at 5am on 25 December wandering around a themed hotel in Disneyland, Florida, in search of breakfast for three jet-lagged children. Maybe it was my Catholic upbringing but there is something about Mickey Mouse on Christmas Day that's decidedly creepy.
So this year, as in the past few, W10 beckons, free from avocado bathroom suites, put-up beds, dodgy water pressure and the general hell that is modern travel. Should the snow return, it is only a 100m dash to Bas's local shop, open 364 days a year, and whose provisions now extend to De Cecco pasta, St Dalfour jam and Green & Black's chocolate — all essential heartwarming fare, and from my experience, sadly lacking among the paltry offerings of countryside Spars. That's when they are ever open.
Those Londoners joining the mass evacuation this week leave behind a city that's almost unrecognisable. Driving around the capital between Christmas and New Year is pure joy, like being a child again and discovering you've got the playground to yourself. This year I finally got my act together for a family pantomime outing and we have tickets to see Jack and the Beanstalk at Hammersmith's Lyric Theatre. Avatar, viewed from the comfort of leather seats and footstools at Portobello's always-packed Electric Cinema, is booked for Boxing Day, while a kindly colleague passed on five free vouchers to the London Eye.
With the Underground evidently sturdier than the Eurostar, we plan to take advantage of its rush hour-free carriages and catch up with some of London's current exhibitions and galleries.
Worthy stuff, I hear you say, but if you are mad enough to have three young children, the Christmas holidays really is a beast best savoured from the chaos of your own home.
Which doesn't mean I'm totally against ever getting on a plane again. Just not at this time of year. For four days every June, a gang of us converges on a friend's home in Mallorca for a girls-only break of lolloping around in the sun and laughing, blissfully answerable to no one.
There are still some things in life for which it is worth the indignity of exposing your untanned feet to airport security.
Reader views (1)
can't agree more...;-)
Thanks to marriage anc children, as you say, we are spending our second Xmas at home in London, and we just love it! No hassle travelling with young children, no schedule to visit the family, no obligation to see people we don't want to see, it is just perfect!
We are foreigners living in London, both our families are in Europe, and we thoroughly enjoy our British Xmas (ok, minus Xmas pudding, let's be honest...)
- Chris, london, 22/12/2009 13:06
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