It's been a busy day: two Christmas dinners, one at Compton, with wonderful friends, including a pair of brides to be, and another in the evening with my mother, sister and her family.

At lunchtime I drove up from Streatley in the sunshine, passing Aldworth church, where ancient effigies twist on white stone tables. Seven foot, 14th century knights, former county sheriffs and royal retainers, their features blurred by time and Cromwell's men.

After almost a week, the snow was still crisp and dazzling in the fields. I passed a grand house first built and then rejected by one of the Spice girls.

The thought of Christmas always makes me uneasy. The layers of memory and expectation. A scratched family movie in which I am a child jumping with ecstatic excitement in an attempt to pick peaches from an Australian tree. A mad ride on a new rocking horse, the camera's clockwork motor running much too fast. Petulant 5-year old face, holding out a toy telephone to the camera. Is this my present? Is this really it?

Midnight mass the night before. After forty years, fewer familiar faces. Faces crumpled, standing less tall than in my memory. The organ plays, hope flickers dimly. The singing is rougher, more hesitant, and the congregation is smaller. This new priest is the fifth I've known and the first to be my junior. In the candlelight I ask his old familiar story be true.

Dim prayers for peace as soldiers perish in Afghanistan. Thoughts of Yeats' rough beast slouching in.
My father's birthday, the time Jeremy's mother died. Lost loves. The make believe of Dickensian cheer replicated at table after table.
Rich food steams, product of complex culinary choreography - some smiles half-forced, the panic shoved back down. Is the bird too brown? Tradition reinvented, older but not wiser, we dance the dance together again.

How will it be once another 12 months have gone round? Who else will be forgotten for just a moment in the careless festivities, having slipped quietly from the room?