Christmas is just around the corner. Which is why today’s Sunday supplements aren’t so much magazines and sales catalogues. “148 pages of gift ideas!!!!” shouts the cover of the Times ‘Style’ section. Shoot me now.

Hate shopping. Hate Christmas. Bah humbug.

Never mind. We go away for Christmas. We always do. Because Mrs Conway needs some sunshine, Sunshine. Otherwise she gets low and miserable. I always thought living with me did that but apparently its living with me in the winter. There’s some hope in the summer.

Its not a heat thing, she don’t mind the cold. Prefers 40 degrees to -3 any day, but its more about sunlight. Vitamin D. Otherwise she gets SAD. Not just sad (unhappy, miserable, listless) but SAD (Seasonal Affectational Disorder). Oh, that one. Yes, that one. Any excuse to go find some winter sun.

The elder daughter used to go horse riding. Every (fucking) Saturday morning for about 8 years. The horsey years. When I’d sit in a fucking barn in the freezing cold, watching her fall off various ponies for an hour and thinking of Christopher Reeve. Nice, relaxing time. In a barn in Radlett. I’d have preferred a barn in Burnley but Radlett was (marginally) nearer. And one day as we walked through the stables, there was a little pony in its stall with a reading lamp. Odd, I thought, I’ve heard of talking horses (Mr Ed), but never ones that read. Oh no, said the stable lady, that’s a UV lamp for vitamin D. That pony gets SADS.

How the fuck would anyone know that? Mrs C speaks pretty good English (for a northerner), but little Rosie, or Hemlock, or Heart of Midlothian or whatever it might have been called, doesn’t. So how do they know? Is this a ‘why the long face?’ moment?

Anyway, taking your main holiday at Christmas, when its cold and dark and grey here for about 5 months, is great. We’ve always done it, even when the kids were little we’d drag them off to Thailand or South Africa or wherever the sun shone at that time of year. Poor things.

So we won’t be here for Christmas. We’ll be in Jamaica. Oh, that’s nice, people say, where abouts are you going? No clue. No idea. Don’t care. We’re going to the sunny bit and we’re going to stay there lapping it up. We won’t deviate, diverge or do anything other than digest. A lot of digestion, I’m hoping. Its not a fact-finding mission, its all about sun.

The only shopping I’ll do is for sun-tan lotion.

Happy Christmas,

A xxxx