I’ve been travelling for work again, England and France – some of it by train. It turns out you really can go from a friend’s house in suburban London to a fairly remote village in the south of France by train between lunch and dinner.
Since my children were very small, at the end of a work trip I’ve made a habit of stopping at a bakery on the way to the airport, to bring them the small miracle of an unfamiliar treat made that very day in another country. It feels like a way of enjoying the ambiguous gifts of fast travel.
Some cakes were obviously unsuitable, though sometimes I tried anyway, cradling carefully packed choux buns and interesting meringues through short flights. I think caring for fragile cakes on the way home felt like an outward sign of my invisible missing and minding of my sons while we were apart.
My boys are men now, and I seem to have stopped with the squashy cakes, but I still like to bring home some token. At this time of year I find myself considering dividing my purchases: something to eat now, something I can put by for Christmas.
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I know people – well, women, which isn’t to say men don’t, only that I don’t know about it – who shop for Christmas all year, people who must be so organised that they have places to keep presents for 11 months. It’s easier, they say. Come December, all that remains is the wrapping.
I think women in particular should do whatever makes the annual marathon of care and service and exaggerated domestic labour less onerous. If that’s writing Christmas cards in Lent, go ahead. But that kind of advance planning is wholly alien to me. It wouldn’t be easier. I don’t think it’s in any way wrong or undesirable to anticipate the work of Christmas, I just can’t imagine myself doing it.
In most aspects of life, I’m more of a winger than a planner. I thrive on improvisation and I have a complicated relationship with deferred gratification. Having been raised to wait until the moment that never came when I’d have earned or deserved pleasure, I want to reject that kind of bargaining and also find it ingrained in my bones.
If I come across a gift proportionate to our relationship that someone in my life would enjoy, and I can afford to buy it and have a plausible way of getting it to them, I’d rather do it now than wait until the numbers on the calendar give permission.
I also think that many tasks extend to fill the time available. If you start work on Christmas – or a birthday or wedding – months in advance, it will take months. Sometimes deadlines promote efficiency.
I wouldn’t apply this idea to the writing of books, or probably the making of art in general, which takes as long as it takes and often comes slowly, but for less subtle work a time limit keeps things in proportion. In cooking dinner, for example, usually the point is not to make the perfect meal in infinite time but to put something nourishing and palatable on the table close to the time people expect to eat.
As I have often said to students requesting extensions to deadlines, we’re not asking for the best essay you could ever write, we’re asking you and everyone else to do a good job in the time available.
So there’s an art, I suppose, an act of discernment, in deciding how early to start. When I’m travelling, unless it’s very early in the morning I like to pack on the day of departure.
[ Have yourself a merry last-minute Christmas. Shop early and forget perfectOpens in new window ]
Starting earlier just leads to indecision and fuss. Often I leave Christmas shopping until December 22nd and then spend an afternoon in a really good bookshop, because people who don’t read much just haven’t found the right book and I’m good at finding books, and if I’m wrong it means only that a writer and a real-life bookshop made an extra sale.
A day later feels too close to the deadline, earlier feels like giving more of my life to a festival I regard with ambivalence.
So I suppose the idea is to decide how much of your precious life you truly want to devote to the job, and start exactly that long in advance, because there are, thankfully, no extensions for Christmas.
