Unable to return home to Ireland for her annual family gathering, the novelist resigned herself to a lonely day – but thenthingstookanunexpectedturn

In 2020 when it became clear I would not be returning home to Ireland for Christmas because of Covid restrictions, I did not cry. I bid my heart to stay sturdy and dry because there was no point in breaking down.

It was an interesting time to be a person who is eerily efficient at repressing emotions. There were moments during lockdowns when time began to warp so badly that I no longer believed with any conviction that things would ever change. I couldn’t imagine I would be with people again in a natural and intimate way, and this in turn came to mean I could no longer imagine why to remain alive. But just as quickly as that total darkness would pass over my brain, the following hour I was comfortably blank, content even, watching The Real Housewives and baking cakes that would languish untouched outside my neighbour’s front door.

When I woke on Christmas morning I remained impassive, stepping outside into the calm grey morning, feeling that it was at least interesting to be here, to be alive, interesting to be without my family on this day for the first time. I set my table carefully, trying to feel that it was worth the charade of formality, arranging the flowers and polishing the Champagne glass. I sat down, my salmon and capers artfully arranged. I took a picture of the scene and posted it on Instagram, hoping to convey the image of a self-sufficient person. Then I bit into the fish and felt my throat rise in dismayed protest, an unmistakable tang of sour wrongness made me spit it right back out. The salmon had gone off and it was this, farcically, that made me cry.

I thought of all the things that went wrong at Christmas at home; my mother dropping carrots and weeping in frustration, me getting defensive during a board game, my brother’s horseplay shattering glasses. Things went wrong but then were resolved and we fought and made up. Without my family, it didn’t matter that the salmon had gone off. I didn’t care about the stupid salmon – in fact, I now thought, I had never particularly enjoyed smoked salmon, not as much as I do, say, an average supermarket sausage.

I decided to go to mass at the local Catholic church because it suddenly seemed vital that I hear the same pleasantly boring drone I ambiently tuned in to while sitting beside my father and grandmother every other year. In the church, though, with all its physical protections and distances, I felt more alienated than ever.

At this point of the day I resigned myself to the fact I was having a bad Christmas, but I had made plans to eat dinner with my friends Lolly and Francisco, a couple whose household I had bubbled with. I walked to their place enjoying my misery. This will make me feel worse again, I thought, intruding on their day when they are in love and I am alone. Yes, I decided, it was an indictment of my failures in life that I was without a family or structures of my own and could only impinge on others.

I sometimes call Francisco my best friend but I suspect there may be 500 people in London who describe him as their best friend, so gregarious and charming and wonderful is he. I should have known that he would reconfigure the sadness I felt into a manic giddiness, a feeling that we were getting away with something, an exhilarating sense that the inmates were running the asylum. He executed a full Christmas dinner, complete with British novelties like pigs in blankets, and I was moved that he would go to such trouble for me.

Lolly and I wore complimenting hot-pink party dresses and drank cocktails and gossiped, and after dinner we screamed laughing at Eastenders. They sang In the Bleak Midwinter, my father’s favourite Christmas song.

I did cry a little bit then, longing for him, but I looked at my friends and felt ecstatic with love for them, amazed that I was so lucky. I realised I felt just as wanted and loved as I did in Ireland, a powerful new thought. As a woman who does not want children, whose lifestyle tends toward the unconventional and unpredictable, it meant something very dear to me to understand that there were other families I was a part of without even having known it.

Acts of Desperation, by Megan Nolan, is out now (Vintage, £9.99)