The house my parents live in is not the house I grew up in, and to visit it is an act of subtle disorientation. Objects remain the same: the chest of drawers with one chipped glass handle, the bedding box I fell off, once, landing myself in A&E, the painting of a man carrying firewood between rows of bare-branched poplars. But they have been repositioned now so that their angles catch me strangely and anew. It is a house whose secrets I know, yet I am unsure how to find them. Where are the photos kept? The soup bowls? The keys? I wake in my childhood bed to unfamiliar light.
The last time I went home for Christmas was five years ago. My dad was a Christmas baby, and this was his 70th. I made for a terrible house guest – newly divorced and deeply distressed, quite at odds with the air of celebration. One still, cold morning I went for a run, slipped on the icy flagstones and headed bruised and tearful all along the lane and up the hill behind the house. At the top I looked out: frozen ferns, distant woodland. It was quite silent, quite beautiful, air sharp, breath pale as moth-wings. Yet what hit me in that moment was not the majesty, but the sense that I did not belong there.
Winter has always been an ill-fitting season for me. I loathe the cold, and the grey and the hopelessness of it all. From November to late March, I hunker down and wait – for something to start, for the drabness to pass, for the first glints of green to rescue me.
At the heart of this season lies Christmas, a holiday that no longer seems to tally with the life I have made for myself – I am unmarried, I do not have children, I live alone. So, to return home to the convivial, warm-hearthed gatherings, the reunions in the pub, the catch-ups with old friends, is to be reminded of all the ways in which I do not quite match.
The years since have brought a new kind of winter, however, and with it a different kind of Christmas too – one that hinges not on tradition or expectation, but on new ways of belonging: a long misty morning walk across London; a dinner of tacos and oysters and margaritas; dancing and music and friends.
My family seem to understand. In the dreadful winter of five years ago, my dad sat on the edge of my bed and told me my life was going to be quite different now. It felt like a kind of permission. Soon afterwards I caught a plane to Mexico and, standing there in the taxi queue in my heavy clothes, alone and pale and bewildered, I felt as if I was finally repositioning myself in a new light – that in this strange kind of nowhere was a place to belong.
• Laura Barton’s Notes From a Musical Island returns to BBC Radio 4 next year
