“It looks like it might be a gezellig Christmas”

FLUENT in Dutch, my sister uses the odd Dutch word once in a blue moon when she can’t find an English one to do as good a job. She’s on the phone now.

‘This Christmas is going to be gezellig,’ she says, with a wriggle of pleasure in her voice.

I first heard her Dutch husband use the word ‘gezellig’ years ago. My sister and I had been for a swim on the beach with the children. In the absence of our husbands — who’d swum off an hour earlier and appeared as two tiny black dots on the horizon line — we stood in an Irish summer typhoon force 8, wearing icy wet togs and trying to towel off six children with three towels beneath a raised rear car door.