My weirdest Christmas: I insisted, through gritted teeth, that it would be fun to eat outside

It was 2020, and I hired a gazebo and heaters so we could have a festive feast with my mum in the garden. What could possibly go wrong?We called it “diffmas”, because it was going to be a different kind of Christmas. Our son was five, so we were trying to package it appealingly for him. But we might have done that anyway, given the kind of year we’d had – and by “we” I don’t just mean my family, I mean the world.It was 2020. When the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, had announced, in March, that we “must stay at home”, it left my mum, who had lived on her own since my dad died in 2012, completely alone, like many people, for months on end. Her work had involved travelling all over the country, having meetings, organising events, networking. Then, in lockdown, everything stopped. She was Zooming with the best of them, but it was clearly extremely difficult. Continue reading...