Driving Home For Christmas

When I was a child, our advent calendar came out each year. The doors were stuck down with blue tack, ready to be reused the following year, this went on through my entire childhood.

Now I am an adult, there are many things about Christmas that I would like to see the end of.

• Christmas crackers – you pull them, they go bang, a load of junk falls out, it all goes in the bin.
• Endless discussion about a white Christmas – No, it won’t happen (it never does).
• The Christmas Radio Times – Now costs the same as a university degree and is so heavy it needs a crane to lift it up from the shelf.
• Secret Santa – everyone spends money on someone they don’t know and gets something they don’t like.
• Wham/Slade/Mariah/Wizard – That’s enough.

More seriously, my autistic brain also doesn’t like flashing lights, crowds and disruption to routine. Christmas is full of this. In short, I am always glad when it is over.

This year, I had managed to book some time off from the half-finished hotel in the run up to Christmas and decided to escape and have some family time. This involved a journey on the west coast mainline. Apparently, 32% of services have been ‘severely disrupted’ this month. I am surprised that it is so low. I don’t think I have ever travelled through Lancashire’s trio of doom (Wigan, Preston & Lancaster) without a wait of at least half an hour – usually unscheduled. The three of them are designed in a way that nobody can ever make their connections or find any glimmer of joy at all. Like a wetter version of Hotel California, you can check out but never leave.

This time we were treated to a “senior conductor” who made several announcements but was never actually spotted. Even when an elderly man fainted due to the overcrowding and heat being stuck on, the senior conductor remained elusive, possibly working from home. We were advised that as people were standing in the entrances, hot drinks were not available from the café. Obviously, the decision to blame the passengers for daring to stand on an overcrowded train is something nobody will have any problem with.

The reason the train was so late was a little variable. Over the course of the journey, the senior conductor informed us that it was speed restrictions in Milton Keynes, trespassers in the West Midlands, a lack of platform availability in Litchfield and also a fault on an unspecified other train. I got the feeling the senior conductor had started malfunctioning.

Once all that was over, the holiday came and went without any severe incident. I went to see the film Maestro at the cinema. I enjoy going in the middle of the day with the retired people, often I get a free biscuit with my ticket. This time, I managed to miss the start, I also left for the toilet and fell asleep missing 20 minutes in the middle. The bits I actually saw were very pleasant but I got the feeling that nothing much happened, but I couldn’t be sure, I might have just missed them.

On my way back from the cinema, I got my family a multipack of cheese from a Christmas market as a gift for the big day. Any seven cheeses for £25. Again, maybe an autistic thing but the choosing seemed a bit overwhelming, so I asked the man behind the counter to do it for me. He said he didn’t know what the cheeses were and was only covering the stall for his brother. In the end I asked for the whole of the top row, much like a Countdown contestant.

The Christmas market itself has started selling tika masala, sushi, tacos and spring rolls. All festive family favourites, what I couldn’t see was mince pies. I heard a five-star hotel in Scotland has given up selling mince pies as 70% of them are thrown away, maybe saying more about the stock control and food quality than anything else. Perhaps that wouldn’t be something that I would have announced in a press release.

Anyway, the holiday is over and back to the half-finished hotel I go. I will go into battle with the train stations of Lancashire trying to avoid breaking my foot on a falling copy of the Christmas Radio Times.

Same time next year? Probably.