Who's The Daddy: Christmas makes you realise what you’ve got and how quickly it can be taken away.

Although it seems to arrive earlier every year, it only really starts for the majority of us when we hear Wham!’s Last Christmas for the first time, a game that social media has dubbed Whamageddon.

The trick is to see how long you can last out. Once you hear it, it’s game over. For yours truly, Sunday November 26 at a works do at Hartleys in Preston.

For 7,215 Northampton Town and Portsmouth fans, it was Saturday December 2 when the club’s DJ wiped everyone out when he played it over the PA at the match. On purpose. Mind you, he could lay claim to have broken the record for 2023’s earliest “You’ve ruined Christmas!” So that’s something.

Visiting family at Christmas is pretty straightforward and stress-free these days, seeing as nearly all of mine are in the same place now, a cemetery on top of a massive windswept hill in Dalton-in-Furness.

I suppose what I’m trying to say, in my own ham-fisted, stream-of-consciousness way, is that for some reason Christmas makes you realise what you’ve got, and how quickly it can be taken away.

Last Saturday morning the story time staple, Michael Rosen’s We’re Going On A Bear Hunt, popped up on TV, which has gone through such a major rewrite and shift in tone that it should come with a trigger warning for anyone with elderly relatives.

In this version, the bear is patently neglected pensioner, once central to the family, dying of sheer loneliness in a cave, but whose dishevelled appearance and poor personal hygiene, repeatedly remarked upon by one of the snot-nosed kids and they are repulsed to such an extent that they run off, chased all the way home by a confused and terrified animal clearly suffering from some form of dementia.

And then the final scene of the broken-hearted bear traipsing back to its lonely cave by the sea is just a bit too much for a Saturday morning.Put it this way, I’ve been unable to think of anything else since. And that includes the recent horrors of Manchester United’s annual visit to Anfield (0-0 felt like a 5-0 victory. I’d have sold my good kidney for a point at kick-off). Is that bear me or the boss in a few years after one of us has died? Is it my parents and grandparents?

Anyway, the most wonderful time of the year. Daughter #2 was the first to land home. Full of a cold and Lord knows what else from her student house, full-time uni course and part-time job. Daughter #1 is due back Friday, when she can fit us in between her boyfriend and the flat he bought in Morecambe last year.

Thanks for reading this all year. You have no idea how much I appreciate it. Sometimes this column feels like therapy. For me, not so much for you. Have a phenomenal Christmas.

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