To all the Christmas Day mes and all the Christmas Day yous

O lovely peace

Each time this point of the year comes around I’m always blindsided by emotion and it’s as if, as I get older, I feel the culmination of all the feelings I’ve felt at all the Christmases gone by. I think life gets more beautiful, words and actions become more meaningful, and the Winter season grows more special and more magical to me as I age. At the same time I have more feelings, old and new, than I know what to do with.

Sat in the The Pot Still in Glasgow in Summer 2021, the night before I set off to walk the West Highland Way on my own, I realised that when I am alone I feel surrounded by memories of people and of the different versions of me and so, conversely, I’m less alone than when I’m with other people. Talking to others, tapping into their energy, being taken into their stories, their psychodramas, their moods and desires means I’m visiting another country. I’m holidaying. When I’m just with me I’m with a whole host of my own feelings and thoughts, my own ghosts and shadows. I am more fully alert to my life when I’m alone, as explored in Olivia Laing’s ‘The Lonely City’. I feel like I am listening to my own radio. Or, more, like I’m moving between the radio stations of the lives I’ve lived, the lives I’m living. It’s busier, somehow, than socialising. I think on Christmas morning, waking up left to my own devices, it was no surprise that I felt ambushed by all of the selves who have loved those I’ve loved and lived how I’ve lived. It was a relief to cry and know it was good. Crying felt like coming back to a lovely kind of peace.

I read Joan Didion the other night (thank goodness for Maria Popova for chucking these gems my way just when I need them), saying that we should be on ‘nodding terms’ with our former selves. Didion is talking about why some of us keep notebooks, how we are always trying to pin down the self at specific moments, otherwise we forget all to easily, the words we once ‘screamed and whispered’. The things we swore we’d feel forever leave us as mysteriously as they arrived, and we forget them. We keep forgetting everyone we once were.

Didion talks about the ‘implacable I’ through which we see everything - we see things not as they are, but as we are. I love the line from the poem by Marilyn Monroe, ‘only parts of us will only touch only parts of others’ but it never held true for me. I usually feel I can swim in another’s pond all too easily. I don’t struggle to relate - I struggle to hear my own radio above another’s and I mistake their moods for my own, their problems for my own and also their joys for my own. This way of being comes from my mother, which comes from her mother. And it makes people love me. Sometimes, though, I long for the armour that some women wear in the world.

‘To ever get close to me/ was some fucking wizardry’, sings Rebecca Lucy Taylor. I love this song because it’s a fantasy to me, to be so implacable, to be untouchable, to have a wall that keeps others away. I sing the aptly named Self Esteem on my own in the bedroom now, aged 40, in the way you’d expect teenagers to. But I didn’t have her then - when I sing her songs now, it’s for me at 16. I’m not just trying to be on nodding terms, I’m singing back to my old self, I’m giving her the songs and words she didn’t have. It doesn’t surprise me that so many women my age and older love these songs; she is singing to the unhealed part in all us. She makes you believe the pain is all for some good; ‘I ignored the warnings/ But from that I’m learning.’ She sings the things we want to be true about ourselves, for ourselves and we feel we’re getting closer to that strength by singing along with her. And we are.

I remember being sat at the Praetorian fountain in Palermo with my little sister who, aged 18 (I was 21), was listening on her headphones to ‘My, Myself and I’ by Beyonce after breaking up with her boyfriend on from a payphone. She was crying, but at least she had the right song at the right time.

Walking to my friend’s house yesterday, Christmas Day, I listened to Lauren Laverne interview Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs. Kirsty said she’d been astounded to learn that Joni Mitchell wrote ‘Both Sides Now’ at aged 25. I know what she means- the song is world-weary and full of the wisdom gleaned through heart ache that she couldn’t possibly have lived through by then. It’s as though she was singing to her middle-aged self, she was singing for the woman she would become. I first heard that song as a teenager but I didn’t understand it until it was spelled out for me by Emma Thompson’s acting, in the scene that (almost?) redeems the otherwise emotionally-shallow film ‘Love, Actually’. I think I’m closer to understanding it now, but life has taught me that there’s more to come from that song. The best poets write the words we understand on some level at each of the ages we are, but with a new richness, sadness, and depth each time we come across them.

On Christmas Eve I had an exchange with a stranger that made me feel exactly like I was 16 again - in some of the good ways and in all of the bad ways. It was thrilling and unsettling. It was enlivening and shame-inducing. It was a powerful resurgence of the me I was then. This is the me I have to love the most, for all of her faults, this is the me that makes me want to work with young people, this is the me that I keep trying to be on ‘nodding terms’ with, to sing to. But she usually won’t catch my eye. I keep trying to tell her she’s beautiful but she won’t stay in the room with me. It’s my fault more than hers - I’m scared of her, for her. On Christmas Eve of my fortieth year, we met again. I dressed myself in her clothes. I took the photos she would’ve taken if she could’ve. I bought the lipstick she might have just tried on in the shop, or that she might’ve pocketed. I spent a few hours with her. By Christmas morning, she was gone.

I am closer today to the Boxing Day me at aged 4, 16 and 35 than I am to the me of only last week, aged 40. The ghosts of Christmas past aren’t unfamiliar spirits coming through my window like in ‘A Christmas Carol’. They are old parts of myself that come out only at this time of year, like Christmas fairies that I forget to believe in the rest of the year.

I live in a peaceful cottage, where I can see the light on the trees through every window. From my comfortable sofa I can see the squirrels running up the branches and down again. The sun is shining on them this morning. My favourite moment of yesterday, Christmas Day, was as we were about to eat, when my friend and her sister sang a song I’d never heard before, so beautifully, in a round. It was ‘O Lovely Peace’. Their harmonies made me cry.

O lovely peace, with plenty crown'd,
Come, spread thy blessings all around.
Let fleecy flocks the hills adorn,
And vallies smile with wavy corn.
Let the shrill trumpet cease, nor other sound
But nature's songsters wake the cheerful morn.
O lovely peace. ..

I notice now the delicious irony that it’s a song instructing you to forgo the need for music, to look to the flora and fauna instead, but of course the melodies and harmonies of the song itself are irresistible. How brilliant.

I can’t wait to sing all of the words with my little sister when we see Self Esteem on tour in March next year. We’ll be 37 and 40, we’ll be 17 and 21, we’ll be 3 and 6, and we’ll be singing to ourselves at 68 and 71, too.

Like Joni, I really don’t know life at all. The best I can do is to wish for you that the right song found the right you, at the right time.

Merry Christmas.

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