Christmas comes in slow up here. Across the river we have a few decorations that suspend from the lamposts - there's a star and an angel and a santa and a candle that flickers on and off and a robin in red and green and outside the fire station there is a tree lit up and outside the bus stop there is another tree, lit up and doing us proud. And that is it. Yesterday we put up a tree in the living room and strung a length of coloured lights around the picture above our bed and the blue and red and yellow and green lights reflect in the window which reflects onto the sea.

I know, In Edinburgh, where I used to live - most beautiful city on the planet - that in George street outside a very swish bar lavish decorations get wound around columns in October! And I walk past trying not to see, thinking, at least let us have Halloween first. Give us a pumpkin and a witch at least.

Here, in the local town twenty miles away the town Christmas lights are switched on at the beginning of December by Mr and Mrs Claus and the local primary school children belting out a few festive songs. And maybe it's the time of year and its tendency towards provoking memories but as I wait for Mrs Santa Claus to finish her rendition of 'it was the night before Christmas' being, as she told us and I quite agree, Santa's favourite story, my mind ambles into Christmases past.

Like Dortmund and one ginormous Christmas tree and the smell of gluwein and bratwurst and stalls with candles and cake and people in gloves and red noses. It's obviously a social thing. Friends gather round the gluwein stalls laughing and reminiscing, in for the night, you can tell.

Then there was a Greek island where Christmas dinner was cooked in an outside oven and a group of us sat cross legged, and, if I can remember correctly, meditated.

Then there were the Christmases in Sussex with the real candles on the tree and the hushed feeling that comes with seeing that, no matter where you've been and how you've been feeling, some peace comes with a lit tree and people under it singing Holy Night in as many launguages as we can muster and in those days there were many.

Then the time I played the angel Gabriel and sang while trying to hold a very heavy star and there was my dad in the audience and I am not six but twenty two. Better late than never.

Then us huddled in the hall, six for real now, and dad saying we had to go back to bed, Santa hadn't come, and the excitement, the heart rush no amount of wine since can ever re-create and us shouting from the wonderful banishment of our room - has he come yet? And then the answer from heaven itself - YES.