My dad’s Christmas round robins used to mortify me: now I see the magic in them
The round robin is very, very dead. Even Debrett’s thinks they’re tedious and unnecessary, and keeping tedious and unnecessary stuff going is Debrett’s whole thing. The idea of an end-of-year roundup shoved into a Christmas card has been dead for so long that even the whole tranche of comedy built on mimicking the smuggest, most thunderingly boring retellings of the year’s exploits – incredible trips abroad, professional triumphs, angelic and gifted children – is gone too.
The reasons are fairly obvious. If I want to know what your kids are up to and where you went on holiday, Instagram will tell me. If I want your take on the state of the nation, I’ll check which James O’Brien clips you’ve retweeted. If I ever want to know how your career’s going, I’ll snoop on your LinkedIn. And generally, I don’t want any of these things anyway.
My dad, though, is one of the few people still sending out round robins. “Nothing for it, chums,” he wrote in his first letter in December 1995, “but to cave in to the new trend, hit the keyboard of the multimedia, and bring you up to date.”
Dad was going to start his round robin, all right. But he was going to put a rocket up it. His round robins – or Round Roberts, as he impishly styled them after himself – served family updates with a snarky, irreverent, baroque topspin and a side of incisive topical satire, a kind of Have I Got Round Robin for You. My mum got her own segment at the end to pass on any actual family news.
Now, I adore my dad. He’s brilliant. I love the man very much. But this turned out to be difficult to sustain, and the content was – to put it mildly – variable. “I have had a little runin with Fate these past few months,” the 1998 edition opened. “It started off slowly enough with a sponge pudding which I left in the microwave for 25 minutes instead of the 2.5 written on the packet.” By 2004, things were more serious: “We’re all well and still breathing, which is more than can be said for my beloved Volvo Wentworth. It died with its tyres on, having only done 192,000 miles.” The 2005 edition was largely about having to sweep up leaves from his lawn that hadn’t even fallen from his trees.
As I hit my teens, the idea of the Round Robert started to feel mortifying. It was sort of fine being gawky and odd at home, but having that gawk written down and sent around the country filled me with dread. Dad started mentioning how many girls at school gave me Christmas cards. At 13, he wrote that I was “so laid-back he’s horizontal”; by 14, I was “very hormonal”. “I pray daily,” Dad wrote when I was 16, “that HSE [Health and Safety Executive] don’t learn about his bedroom.” Daaaad-uhhhh. My older brother was, at 13, “quite the young man, complete with braces and attitude”. Mum’s section increasingly had the air of a woman running around with a fire extinguisher.
When the latest Round Robert landed last week, though, I couldn’t
wait to read it. It all changed when I was at my mum and dad’s last Christmas. I got the whole sheaf out and flipped through them. I expected to feel that rush of cold dread all over again, but it was wonderful.
They’re funny, and more vulnerable than I remembered. That bundle of papers has turned into a little family archive. My dad’s in his 70s now, and there’s a finite number of Round Roberts yet to be published. When he’s gone I’ll have a whole trove of stuff telling the story of my childhood and how our family grew up.
It’s all there, and all in his voice. I treasure them. Even the 1999 edition, where he relives his entry into my primary school’s Stars in Their Eyes competition as Frank Sinatra’s Lancastrian brother Fred with an X-rated rewrite of My Way. He lost to some dads doing the Blues Brothers.
So this year I’m writing my own round robin. A year whips by so fast, and my Instagram posts make it look like I’ve mainly spent 2023 looking at underlit, blurry food. Tidying up the more interesting stuff that’s happened this year into something neat, satisfying and coherent makes the last 12 months feel a lot more whole, and closed.
It’ll be smug and tedious and sentimental, and I’ll bore on about holidays and work and seeing friends. One thing, though: I’m skipping the bit where I send it to friends and family, instead sticking it straight into a sheaf by my desk to start my own little archive of the mundane. If I’ve learned nothing else from my dad, it’s to never, ever send them to anyone.