Jogging Along

by James Birk

Chapter 14

  Christmas with my family had always been a pretty good time for me. Traditionally I would return to my parent’s house on or around Christmas Eve, and spend the evening in the local pub with my friends from school, who were back seeing their families. Then I’d return home inebriated, with a takeaway in hand to drunkenly chat to my mother as she finished off the preparations for the following day’s meal.

  After a fairly restless sleep, the inner child in me would wake up at an ungodly hour, and I would rush down the stairs to see if ‘Father Christmas’ had been (the fact that I had stopped believing in Father Christmas when I was five years old had never prevented my parents from going through the charade of pretending to go to bed, and then sneaking down when we were all asleep to put the presents out, as if the mythical bearded symbol of Christmas giving were indeed a real being) and then sitting impatiently for several hours in my pyjamas, watching poor quality Christmas themed cartoons and waiting for the rest of my family get out of bed.

  Once my brother Geoff had battled his hangover and clambered out of bed to join my sister Ruth, my parents and me, we would manically set about unwrapping everything in sight until my siblings and I were sitting proudly on a pile of presents, that we didn’t necessarily need, deserve or even particularly want, but that nonetheless filled us with unending cheer, because no matter how old we got, we would always be children on Christmas morning.

  Except that this year it wasn’t going to be quite like that, for some reason everyone else was choosing this year to grow up and consequently everything was changing. The first disappointing news had come some months earlier when Geoff had announced that he wouldn’t be making it home at all that Christmas because he was going skiing with some friends.

  Geoff had a much better job than me. He lived in London and for most of the year I never saw him, but we did get on pretty well on the few occasions we did meet up, unlike when we were children and he used to use me as a walking punch bag. Like me he was perennially single, although for Geoff this did seem to be a lifestyle choice rather than through any particular failure to be able to chat up the opposite sex; indeed I remember him dating pretty much every girl I fancied when we were in school, which inevitably made it impossible for me to then go out with them, not that most of them ever looked twice at me.

  Geoff had had the foresight to deliver his gift to me on an earlier visit to my parent’s house, but that didn’t make up for the fact that I wasn’t going to see my older brother at Christmas. We’d spent every Christmas of my life together, bantering, occasionally squabbling and always being overly competitive at board games. I was gutted.

  Ruth was at least planning on joining us, although she too had a bombshell, as she wasn’t going to be waking up with us on Christmas morning, but would in fact be spending the first part of Christmas day with her long-term boyfriend and his family. I had a lot of time for her boyfriend, Carl, he was a thoroughly decent bloke and I was glad my baby sister had someone like him in her life but it didn’t seem right that he should be taking her away from me on the same year that my big brother was also going to be absent. At least Ruth would be joining us at some point, but in all likelihood it would be with Carl in tow, and this, more than Geoff’s absence, was a sure sign that Christmas at the Parker’s would never quite be the same again.

  These changes aside, I still looked forward to my own Christmas routine to get me in the mood, but that too was to take a turn for the worse. Firstly my long term Christmas drinking buddy Dave texted me to say he’d been delayed with work in Birmingham and wouldn’t be making it back home till Christmas morning, and that we’d have to delay our Christmas drink until Boxing Day. Rob was remaining in Cardiff with his now heavily pregnant girlfriend, and that meant that I was going to have to venture to the local pub on my own.

  As an underage drinker, the Golden Lion had been the height of sophistication and wonder for me and my friends, but as a twenty-nine year old, without the badge of being an established ‘local’ and without any of my friends to reassure me, it was an absolutely terrifying place to enter. Full of drunken revellers, I could not discern a single person I knew, and everyone either seemed to be the kind of world weary drunkards who had rarely ventured further than the outskirts of their home town for the last thirty years, or were from the current generation of underage drinkers that frequented my old school. There did seem to be pockets of friends from generations past who were reuniting for the traditional Christmas Eve merriment, but none from my own era.

  I spotted some of my sister’s friends, who were apparently just about young enough to still be allowed to partake in this Christmas Eve tradition, but literally no-one of my age was there. I stayed for a drink with my sister’s peers, just to be sociable, although I doubt they cared one way or another whether I was there, and after one drink I made my excuses and left.

  At least my parents could be counted on to help me find the Christmas spirit.

  But when my old home came into sight it was ominously unwelcoming, with only the hallway light having been left on for security purposes. I opened the front door and my fears were confirmed; mum and dad were out with friends, leaving me as the only Parker who had no-one to spend Christmas Eve with.

  I grabbed a can of cheap lager (my father was not a connoisseur and always preferred a bargain to quality) and flicked through the channels on my parents’ television until I found a repeat of Die Hard, which was only part of the way through, and I sat morosely watching Bruce Willis and Allan Rickman verbally sparring over walkie-talkies, in one of the best Christmas films ever (although it isn’t really a Christmas film, it’s just set at Christmas time, a theme they maintained for the also excellent sequel) By the time Willis dropped Rickman off the Nakatomi building in slow motion, I had barely consumed any of my lager and my parents stumbled in, somewhat the worse for wear, having been enjoying a few seasonal drinks at a neighbour’s house.

  ‘You should have joined us,’ lamented my mother when she realised I had been home alone (Home Alone being another great Christmas film of course!)

  ‘That’s OK,’ I mumbled, though to be honest, if they’d bothered to leave me a note saying where they were, I may well have done.

  Seeing my parents did revive my spirits a little but my enthusiasm for Christmas Eve had waned somewhat so I went to bed and left them giggling in the kitchen as my mother prepared a few odds and ends for the following day.

  At six thirty the following morning I awoke, my inner child refusing to let anything get in the way of the magical moment of seeing all my presents set out as if delivered by the great man in red. But alas, as I walked into my living room there was no sign of any gifts. My parents had obviously reasoned that as I was the only one of their offspring at home for Christmas, it probably wasn’t worth going to be worth going through the Father Christmas charade this year. I understood but I felt deflated. I sat down to watch some Christmas cartoons anyway, but even there I was disappointed, finding only news programmes or cartoons with no Christmas theme at all (which truly seemed illogical).

  Returning to the news and fairly inconsolable by now, I noticed that my phone had a little envelope icon on its screen indicating that I had an unread text message. I picked up the handset and noticed that the message had been sent from Cheryl in the early hours of the morning presumably while she had been out celebrating with her friends from back home. It lifted my spirits a little bit; we were far from the ideal couple but it was still nice to get a Christmas message from my sort-of girlfriend.

  I opened the message and read it and my heart sank even further. It read:

  ‘Hi Hun, don’t think it’s working out. Luv C. X x X’

  I couldn’t believe it – dumped by text message on Christmas Day. Admittedly I was more concerned about the hit my libido was going to take than any long lasting emotional damage but still, it was definitely not a good thing to be dumped on Christmas Day.

  I stared into empty space for ten minutes before a sens
e of urgency overtook me. In seven days it would be a new year, and it would be the year that I would be turning thirty. If everyone else was going to move on, then so was I. It was time to start new traditions.

  I grabbed my battered old trainers and headed off into the freezing cold Christmas morning for my first annual festive run. Thirty minutes later I returned home breathless, but with renewed spirits.

  A quick shower later and I found myself in the kitchen listening to Christmas carols on the radio and preparing the traditional Christmas fry-up for my parents.

  As the bacon sizzled away, my mother ambled into the kitchen looking slightly confused (the fry-up being her usual terrain).

  ‘You seem cheery,’ she smiled.

  ‘I am,’ I replied cracking an egg into the frying pan, ‘it’s going to be a bloody good Christmas!’