I promised myself a quiet December this year. Fewer huge Christmas feasts; less time in the supermarket; longer days under blankets with books and biscuits and babies. Yet somehow I’m so busy I had to cancel my therapist appointment this week - almost comically bad self-care - and my days are split into hour-long segments of ‘Jesus, where am I supposed to be once this has finished?’ Publishers seem to be having end-of-year panics too, demanding blurbs on tighter deadlines than normal, which suits me fine; I might actually be able to afford the presents I’ve got piled up in various cupboards.
Even in December, I really don’t drink. In our book club, the joke is how excited I get about having a whole bottle of Schloer to myself because everyone else is on the prosecco. But our Christmas meeting is at a restaurant, and it seems sociable to have a glass of wine with our meal, then another, and another, and then the chef is sending limoncello shots and someone’s googling niche sex terms and we’re tumbling out into the street, trying to get into closed bars like we’re teenagers instead of members of a local playgroup, and we find an open pub and drink flavoured sambuca shots and someone’s carrying the half-pizza we liberated from the restaurant then we’re inside a club where everyone is either underage or looking like they hope their wife doesn’t catch them there, and when I leave at 2am I realise that I’ve overdressed for the weather, in hat and mittens and coat and scarf, and I think of those New York winter evenings out with my sister where we’d be in layer after layer after layer, sometimes two hats, two pairs of gloves, huge shawls, squinting against the icy wind until we bundle with her friends into bars or galleries or brunch joints, defrosting slowly, the blood prickling its way back into our cheeks, not caring about anything. The weather here is milder. I walk by the river in the dark and the quiet, remembering all the times I did this as a student, and I wonder whether I really was naive to do it then, a young woman alone in the dark, or whether I just wasn’t frightened. I wonder if I’ll ever be not-frightened again, without the aid of sambuca and some house red.
At the school gates in the morning, I am disconnected and chaotic. I get several people’s names wrong. I cry through the school nativity. Afterwards, a bright beaming star of a friend takes me for a cooked breakfast.
Man, I love December.
