It’s A Wonderful Life

This week: some notable Christmases, and some festive maps. But first: sorry, I’m going to get soppy on you.

A few weeks ago, thanks to a scheduling cock-up, an episode of Paper Cuts had an entirely male panel. One of the stories we talked about that day was an interview with the man behind “MenSpeak” men’s groups, a sort of AA-style movement for men who have no one to talk to. The piece, in the i Newspaper, was headlined, “An SOS for men: real male friendship is rare”. 

There are no doubt reasons of age and class that explain the fact, but: none of us on that panel recognised any of this. More than that: both of the other men in that room, neither of whom am I especially close to, had at separate points this year gone out of their way to do nice things for me and check I was okay. 

A few years ago, in the humid gap between lockdowns one and two, I messed up my life a bit. One of my friends – a close one, this time; the closest – was then living alone and had not set foot in a pub in months. “Right mate, where d’you want me?” he asked when I texted, and immediately got on a train. As I wrote that sentence, I ever so slightly teared up.

I’ve written only obliquely about the morning last summer when I awoke to find my beloved Agnes, who I’d assumed I would spend the rest of my life with, dead. Perhaps that will change: I have notes on everything I’ve thought and felt these last six months that must now run to thousands of words, and writing can be therapy, as much for the reader who sees their own experience reflected as it is for the writer.

Then again, perhaps it won’t. The idea of turning the worst thing that has ever happened to me into content, of turning the death of someone I loved so completely – who so many loved, and who spent relatively little of her time on this earth with me – into a story feels a bit off, somehow. How can words ever hope to sum up something so all-encompassing as that love or that loss? Agnes was simply the best person I’ve ever known. This newsletter isn’t big enough to contain her absence. This plane of reality isn’t.

But I am still standing. And because it’s Christmas I’d like to talk about why. 

In the wake of that terrible morning, my mother and stepfather arrived and scooped me up and took me home. A day or two later, my aunt flew down from Scotland, simply to be there. Not everyone is blessed with a home and a family they can run back to when they need it. Those of us who are should never take it for granted.

Just as important, though, has been the love and support of my friends. The man Agnes loved like a brother, who came by that morning to help. The old friend I referred to two paragraphs back, who came by every day; the one who drove up from Kent, just to be there while I sat too broken to speak. Still others have insisted on standing with me at difficult moments, and refused to take no for an answer, because they knew that I would need them even if I did not. 

There are those, too, who I don’t know so well, who have still gone out of their way: the acquaintances who bought me a pint, and greeted me with a bear hug, just to check in; the comedian and online friend who has spent months leaving me lengthy voice notes every time he has a thought about Doctor Who; the historian who periodically starts WhatsApp chats about ancient Rome. The message of each and every one of l these interventions has been the same: It may feel it, right now. But you are not alone. 

And then there are my colleagues, who organised to write this newsletter when I could not, or to make sure there were always people I could be with when I needed someone. One even offered to lend me money when I was having a meltdown about an insane and thankfully incorrect energy bill, just so that I would experience it as an administrative inconvenience rather than a last, ruinous crisis. There’s a scene in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons in which the filmmakers try to make a Radioactive Man movie in Springfield. When it all goes wrong, they return to a heroes’ welcome in Hollywood, “where people treat each other right”. That is how I feel about the universally despised British media these days.

One night lingers most of all. Most of my crying this year has been done either in private or on public transport, where the odds of anyone enquiring were low. But for reasons that are lost to me, one night with friends in a pub in Kings Cross I simply lost it. And a group of men in their 30s and 40s, all working in an industry known for neither its sentimentality or its moral fibre, rushed to give me a hug. Another of my oldest friends simply held my hand. He didn’t let go for a very long time.

The bit that gets me every team. Image: screenshot from It’s A Wonderful Life.

I am able to write this because of all those people and more – not least among them, by the way, the one editing the words you are reading right now. We all, at times, need people to check in, to hold our hand, to say “I love you” when you need to hear it the most. I’m not sure if it’s age or class or what that made it possible: but I will always be grateful to be surrounded by people – men – who do that for their friends.

This isn’t about politics, or history, or transport, or any of the other things people sign up to this thing to read, of course. Perhaps it’s self-indulgent, or just plain bad. But it’s Christmas. I just wanted to say thank you.

Some notable Christmases

The first one. I’ve decided to do this chronologically, which was a stupid idea since it presents us with a problem at the very start. To whit: nobody knows when the first Christmas was. We have remarkably little clue when Jesus of Nazareth was born.

There was no year zero, of course: 1BC is followed by 1AD in the traditional christian calendar, so logically it’d make sense for the messiah to be born on 25 December 1BC. This would be perfect, in fact: a Jewish boy’s bris is held on the 8th day of his life, so Jesus’ should have been on 1 January 1AD. A new age.

But there are very obvious reasons to think it unlikely the nativity took place in December at all: it’s a stupid time for the authorities to demand people move about for a census; no one, in midwinter, is grazing their flocks by night; and so on. The decision to celebrate Christmas on December 25 seems to be a combination of piggybacking on other midwinter festivals such as Saturnalia, and the inevitable result of deciding that conception should take part at the spring equinox. 

Then there’s the question of the year. The Gospels suggest that Jesus began his ministry in the 15th year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, when he was aged around 30: that suggests he began preaching in the late 20s AD, and was born several years earlier than 1BC. This fits nicely with the fact that Herod the Great, a figure mentioned explicitly in the bible, died somewhere between 6BC and 4BC (the figure is, helpfully, debated). 

Then again, we might be able to discount that, too: there’s no evidence he ever tried to commit the mass infanticide he’s accused of, and anyway regional kings were then in the habit of pretending they’d taken over earlier than they had for legitimacy reasons, making even the vague dates we have for his death suspect.

Anyway, the point is: we don’t know! Great start. Continuing with our theme:

c330? Maybe?¹ St Nicholas, the possibly mythical bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey but what was then the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire, gives three girls some gold to use as dowries so they don’t have to get jobs as prostitutes. This, following some Dutch immigration to the United States and a fair bit of cleaning up, becomes a story about a nice old man who brings toys for children. Aww.

800. After rescuing a pope from some marauders, Charlemagne celebrates Christmas Day by being crowned emperor in Rome and pretending to be surprised about it. In doing so, he resurrects the western Roman Empire which had been dead for over three centuries, but puts so little effort into sorting out his own succession that his immediate descendants will spend much of the next century ripping it to shreds once again. (For more on this, buy my new book, out next year!)

1066. In an absolutely shameless tribute act, William, Duke of Normandy, is crowned King of England on Christmas Day. Where once potential rulers pretended to be Roman, now they pretended to be Charlemagne.