SEASON’S SOLUTION

Winter sun is always appealing, but more so was the thought of adventure, of exposing our children – Phoenix,

12, Cassian, 10 and Leon, 8 – to something completely different. So we headed to Sri Lanka and hit the ground softly, arriving into the luxury of the Anantara Tangalle, easing through the jet lag before taking the train journey from Colombo to Kandy.

“Absolutely no presents” was a much easier sell in a place where Christmas wasn’t omnipresent. In

Sri Lanka, the odd bit of limp tinsel was as close to “ho ho ho” as it got.

Yet it was no less joyful for that. On Christmas Eve, we stood in a river and scrubbed elephants with coconut husks at an elephant orphanage. On Christmas Day, we watched a roadside sword swallower before joining a Buddhist to eat dal with our fingers in a tea plantation. That evening, the children played cricket with an impish boy called Kevin Pietersen, before visiting a funfair that would have made a British health and safety officer faint. By a pool at the foot of Lovers’ Leap Falls, a wizened man with cataract-clouded eyes offered to take us to the top; after an arduous climb, he delighted in our admiration of the view and would accept nothing for his troubles but a biscuit.

Another plus was the outdoorsiness of our time together. One person’s “cosy” is another’s one-way ticket to claustrophobia. In