Alexander Armstrong

I wait till early summer to spring-clean so I’m moving my study, a stirring-up that invariably releases powerful methane from its swamp. Every meaningful valueless thing I own has been sorted through and removed from the pretty, bright room next to ours, with the garden below and the custard-cream scent of blooming wisteria, to a dark, unlovely corner of the top floor. It’s a study, not a viewing platform. I tell myself. A while ago, we put a single bed in the corner of our room to tempt our youngest son from climbing into our bed when he came in at 2 o’clock every morning. And it has worked only too magnificently. Two years on, there are now three of us in this marriage.

I used to spend a small part of every Christmas season worrying that perhaps that year, the particular year in which I was worrying, wasn’t quite as Christmassy as all the others. Generally speaking, I can take all the cinnamon and cloves and ching-chingy shop music you can throw at me, even the colossal seasonal uplift in general wassail-ment, without so much as a prickle of Nowell-feeling making itself known in my breast. Don’t for a minute think that I’m any kind of non-Christmas person — nothing could be further from the truth. The season of roaring fires, mince pies, seeing your breath, carols, frost, shooting, presents, booze, decent telly, family and more booze combines the very things I was put on this planet to enjoy the most.