Home for Christmastime

It’s been a few years, but this time I’m going home for Christmas. Mumbled at the station counter so the train tickets were for the wrong day, but S. noticed and fixed it. So we’re off tomorrow, for a week of family and food, cold walks, catching up. It should be lovely. What makes it lovelier still is that Anne Bacheley has obligingly put out a single about it, called ‘Home for Christmastime’. You’re an adult, well past the point at which childhood was a recent memory, but there’s this one place, for one week a year, where you can go and where your brothers and sisters and parents will be too, and it’s almost as though you’re ten years old again. The situation isn’t a universal one, of course, or anything like it, but for anyone it does apply to, there’s this song to have in your head as you set off. As warm and affectionate as the secular carol it is. One two three four, ‘I’m going, going / Home for Christmastime...’.