Christmas Eve Night

Christmas Eve night, 2 a.m.  This is one of my sleepless nights, then.  I’ve been lying here since sometime after midnight.  The one or two hours I had were filled with stressful dreams – my poor sleeping mind trying to tidy the mess of issues that await my return to work.  An impossible task.   And so I lie awake, agitated and exhausted.  I mooch around Facebook, where I follow the thread of Alan Turing’s pardon; “Like” people’s Merry Christmas posts and post my own. 

3 a.m. I get up and go to the toilet, thinking that might be the answer, trying to minimise the noise and not wake my mother.   The flush is like an explosion in the quiet of the night.  I turn out the bed-side light and roll over, pulling the duvet around me and searching for a comfortable spot in the pillow. 

I may have dozed, briefly.  My head is swimming with the problems of the day ahead – how to get presents to my grandchildren and their mother.  My son is apparently coming here with his new girlfriend.  His ex is dropping the children at his house on Boxing Day.  I’ve had no reply from my cousin about visiting her and her parents.  I need to squeeze in a visit to my friend here in York. 

How do I get through tomorrow without getting drunk?  As much as we try to be friendly in the remnants of this family, the tensions are still there – subliminal remarks that just can’t be stifled.  That’s when I feel the urge to drive off and never come back.  I can see why many people stay away – reunions never getting further than an idle conversation with fellow absentees.  I don’t blame them.  Keeps it clean.  Humane.

4 a.m.  I turn off my phone and try again.  Too warm.  I stick my feet out of the duvet.  Too chilly.  I feel like I have a cold coming on.  It has been for weeks.  I don’t know how I’ve avoided it.  I’m thinking of N in Africa – Christmas break by the Lake, salsa dancing.   Worlds apart.  Five months to go.

I wonder what next year will bring?  I want to visit my friends in Madrid and Bergamo, Italy.  Straight after New Year.  I checked flights to Madrid.  It’s affordable as long as I keep this temporary promotion – the one that’s keeping me awake.

I try to empty my head and let sleep come.  It fills, instead, with thoughts of Thomas More.  I read part way through “Utopia”, but it’s his beheading that fills my mind.  How grotesque.  Still happens.

And what of Utopia itself? Where is the intellectual Left?  Their ideas crumble like the ruins of Roman Britain, gossip and entertainment the grass and trees lifting mosaics and bursting fractured masonry.   The hordes of Britons scrambling and squabbling around the empty villas and forums have no interest in or understanding of their workings.

I like the simplicity of More.  I used to read the standard Marxist / neo-Marxist texts at university and often had to make a leap of faith in order to deliver an essay.  Maybe I never really got it.  Maybe I was never meant to – another form of elitism.  While reading More, I thought about how he came across as an early radical.  I liked his point about the teachings of Jesus being counter to the teachings of the Church – an even earlier radical, air-brushed by the clergy that peddle his name? 

Where are those values being championed now?  Has the Left scattered itself to fight a guerrilla war in the wastes of environmentalism, development and human rights?  Did the collapse of the command economies put a bullet through the neck of Marx?  Is the intelligentsia now preoccupied with family-friendly working hours for the professional-parent class?

With all this racing around my brain, how am I supposed to sleep?  At home, I’d probably get up and have a drink, maybe quietly strum the guitar.  No chance here. 

5. a.m.  Christmas day.  I used to sleep in this room as a small child.  At some point, the rattle of wrapping paper from a pillow-case stuffed with presents would wake me and I would quietly open one or two – settling back with a “Beano” or “Blue Peter” annual until my brother came running in clutching a new toy.  That’s forty or more years ago.  That household is now depleted by half – though the wider family has grown larger, more complex and scattered. 

5.40 a.m.   Christmas morning.  Across the gardens, bedroom lights are probably already switching on.  I should try to sleep now.  Busy day ahead.