“Getting stressed at Christmas is for sissies”

THERE’S nothing like a bit of death’s door to file the point on a Christmas memory and keep its edges sharp.

On December 13, 1992, after the delivery of my third child, a whopping haemorrhage kept me pinned to a hospital bed for a week and to my own bed for a further week, on strict doctor’s orders. In the history of Holles Street I doubt there was ever a patient more compliant in obeying these orders than me (a week of bed-rest during the run-up to Christmas. What’s not to love?)

Christmas 1992 saw me cocooned in an oxytocin bubble upstairs at home, marvelling at my early Christmas gift of a quiet-as-a-mouse baby girl in a state of unprecedented calm, wondering whether the doctors had main-lined some sort of serenity drug in with the blood transfusion. Downstairs I could hear my sons shifting Christmas into high gear. I felt deep, warm affection towards my low haemoglobin for allowing me to experience the run up to Christmas at one remove.