Rooftops and chimney pots

Ah, the family Christmas. Five years is long enough to forget why I don't do them, and five days is long enough to remember again.

Perhaps it's the initial warm welcome and my parents' happy faces giving way to bickering, nagging and fussing. Or the fact that 'home' is no longer my home, not my childhood one anyway, but someone else's that I am a stranger to. Or maybe it's the still present echoes from my childhood of the drunken laughter of aunts, uncles, and cousins, pulling crackers at the dinner table and opening pressies under the massive tree, now given way to ticking clocks, a small fibre optic ornament in a dark corner, and old people nodding off in front of the telly. Or the memory of my sister and I staggering in from Gullies at 3am, falling out of bed and waking the whole house up with our fits of laughter, now replaced by early nights, snoring and the occasional owl outside. Everything got so old and slow.

I hate the countryside. Especially the flat, endless, barren countryside of Lincolnshire. So when a long Boxing Day walk may sound appealing to some, in reality it is walking in a flat straight line against bitterly cold winds with nothing to look forward to except turning back.

Don't get me wrong; I love my family and I love spending time with them. But this Christmas made me realise how little I belong to that old world. I remembered why I moved to London, and when I got back here this afternoon I wasted no time taking to my balcony and appreciating the rooftops and chimney pots, the life going on behind windows, the noises, the smells, the sound of people, the traffic, the variety of stuff on offer. I could feel everything around me.

I texted my mum to enquire what they'd been up to this afternoon after I left. They'd been for a long walk and seen a dead sheep.