Drinks with the neighbours – a younger farming family – were, thus, a relief. And then, just short of midnight, it was time to go. And, oh my, how the world had changed. It was darker still, funeral-black, and what had been the lightest snow shower had become the sort of blizzard which usually stars doomed Arctic explorers. It was as I imagine endlessly walking into the Victoria Falls might be, but colder. My fiancée, a French mountain woman, battled on. A sheltered youth in Lancashire hadn’t prepared me for this. Within seconds, I lost all bearings, stumbling off in quite the wrong direction, down a slope (it later transpired) towards the river. I stretched out my arms and couldn’t see my hands. I called out, but blizzards stifle other sounds. I turned this way and that, and had no b—– idea. I was, it occurred to me, about to die only a few dozen yards from safety.

Then, through the howling, I saw a vague light. A torch. I staggered towards it. My fiancée had come to haul me in. I took her elbow, grateful that I’d already got her to say “Yes”, because I was pretty sure she’d now be having second thoughts. “My mother said not to come after you,” she said. “She would have preferred to let nature take its course.”

Oddly, though, that Twixmas episode slightly softened the future belle-mère. She saw me less as an alien kidnapper, more as a clown whose entertainment value might be shared with other village ladies. She even agreed to attend the wedding. The truce held for 30 years. As near-death experiences go, this was a reasonable result. 

An unexpected Twixmas at home, London, 2019

Anna Hart

My Twixmas 2019 did not look promising when, just before Christmas, I had to reluctantly postpone my December 27 flight from London to Los Angeles for a long-anticipated New Year’s Eve shindig with old university friends, as I had hospital test results due on January 2. But what I thought would be a strange limbo period turned into a magical, memorable fling with the city in which I lived for 15 years.

Like most migrants in London, I gratefully fled the city every Christmas – in my case to my parents’ house in Belfast. But now I have been let into the secret: between Christmas and New Year, London turns into the London of Richard Curtis movies, the sort of calm and conducive yet majestic metropolis that we only see on screen.