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CHRISTMAS JOURNEYS

I ASSOCIATE Christmas with travel, often fraught yet freighted with expectation. From the age of eight to 12, I attended a boarding school in Aberdeen while my parents lived in the Middle East.

The Christmas journey, for my brothers and I, would begin after school on a Thursday, with a flight as far as Heathrow. From there, a chaperone would take us to an airport hotel, which seemed unfeasibly luxurious to us.

We would swim, then feast on prawn cocktail, steak and knickerbocker glories (this was the early Eighties). On Friday we joined other excited, boisterous unaccompanied minors at the back of a flight to the Arabian Gulf, bound for the warmth of desert air and parental hugs.

My own children’s winter journey is usually northwards from London to Aberdeen. At Easter, or in the summer, we do this journey by rail, but in the winter, fearing Christmas travel chaos, we rent a car. Already I’m looking forward to the whoop of crossing the border and a first hopeful sighting of snow; of listening to kids’ audiobooks and my husband’s specially made Spotify lists, as I ration out the wine gums.

I relish an armchair winter journey too. In Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories, her tale of Christmas At The Airport paints a modern nativity story, where, amid air traffic control mayhem, a baby born in a menagerie is a gift for all.

In her charming stocking-filler An Almost Perfect Christmas, Nina Stibbe encapsulates the mixed-up emotions of being a young adult back beneath your parent’s roof. ‘At the village pub the Christmas trip home would turn into a sort of annual stocktake where we’d evaluate our current lives… against the ones we’d left behind.’

It is presumably to avoid such a reckoning that in Ali Smith’s Winter, Art offers Lux £1,000 to join him for three days at his mother’s house in Cornwall, posing as his girlfriend. A typically hellish Christmas Eve crowded train journey, aborted bus trip, then taxi ride, affords the pair extra time to get acquainted.

Wherever your Christmas journey takes you, go safely.