There is a reason, having completed one full year in the capital, why the Christmas trips home by London's most recent from-the-home-counties emigres start to get shorter and shorter.
Post that first 12 months, with a full two weeks of party season hangovers to sweat out, the prospect of doing so in one's childhood bed with home-cooked meals every three hours and (clean) kitchen cupboards stuffed full of the sort of treats that would, the rest of the year round, be stuffed on the way home from Sainsbury's Local seems an enticing one.
'Nobody will be around until New Year's Eve anyway,' runs said emigres' initial logic, 'So I may as well book my train back for the morning of the 31st and use the Christmas period as a kind of extended detox.'
First you come back on the 29th, pretty soon it's the 28th. And then coming back on the 27th becomes mandatory
But this, as anyone who has lived more than a year in London knows only too well, is a huge mistake. The texts – 'You back in town yet?' – start coming on the 27th. And by the time you arrive, fresh faced and recharged, for that 2pm lunch booking that is intended to fortify you for seeing in the New Year that very day, at least a third of your crew turn up late, looking like they have just got back from Glastonbury. The retroactive FOMO kicks in, with a mental note made to maybe come back on the 30th next year.
A year after that, it's the 29th. Then the 28th. Pretty soon coming back on the 27th becomes mandatory. 'My bloody boss is making me work,' you start to lie when organizing your trip home. Because, as everybody who has done it once knows, the period between today (the 27th) and New Year's Eve is the best time of year to be in London. Full stop. End of sentence.
The party animal in your life doesn't often have a point. But when they refer to New Year's Eve as 'amateur hour', they most definitely do. Yes, New Year's Eve has to be done. But anybody who fritters away more than an average Friday night's worth of their hard earned on a night when you have to sing 'Auld Lang Syne' at some point needs a serious talking to.
It is not just the fact that, as pointed out elsewhere by Mike Daw, you can bag yourself a table at those restaurants people are perpetually boasting about having eaten at (and, for boasting later purposes, no one needs to know when you went). Nor that fact that any pub or bar will be incredibly pleased to see you and get you served and then reserved within seconds.
No, it's the general atmosphere of having cracked the code, of winning at life. It's like drinking or shopping or eating in the middle of a working week when you've got a day off but nobody else has, except this time everyone else has. It's the closest most of us will ever get to feeling like we're rich and/or famous and work only when we feel like working, thank you very much.
Even if you only go out on the 29th, you have a at least three days before anyone will really, truly bother you. And yes, OK, some have to work (including me this year). But if you thought during that week just prior to Christmas that your colleagues were a little... unfocused, then you haven't seen anything yet.
It's London's biggest and coolest club, and there are no rules. Well, there is one rule, that being: you are not allowed to call this period 'Betwixmas', for reasons that I would hope are very obvious indeed.
