You can always tell Christmas Day in London has arrived because the city falls silent. There always are teeny tiny numbers of shops open, by which I mean patisseries really, such as Caffé Concerto in Knightsbridge or the occasional Starbucks here and there, but for the most part, everything is shut, and that includes the M&S Food and the Sainsbury’s Local whose loading bay is visible, and audible, from the back of my house. At the weekend, noise should not start before 9am, but the supermarkets don’t care. In the summer, I am routinely woken up not simply by the yelling that seems required in order to move a few crates but by the loudest intercom I’ve ever known. I swear every person who has a bedroom within a half-mile radius does not need an alarm clock because at 6:45am there’s always some Sainsbury’s driver ringing the damn thing for five minutes straight.
Not so on Christmas Day, which is the only exception in the year, together with Easter Sunday [whilst M&S is shut also on Boxing Day, Sainsbury’s is resolutely not]. But here’s the thing: Easter Sunday does not compare for quietness to Christmas. When my sleep is light early in the morning, I can always tell it’s gone 6am, because I can hear the intercontinental flights coming into to land at Heathrow. On Christmas Day, the flights are still coming in, but the airport uses alternative runaways to allow for landing whilst minimising noise disruption. I cannot say I heard anything at all this morning and I was awake before dawn broke.
When I walked home yesterday afternoon, I spotted the first Christmas tree discarded in the gutter. This isn’t entirely unusual as, starting on 27 Dec, they tend to multiply pretty rapidly, but a spent tree on 24 Dec is a first even for me. My own is already as dry as a crisp, but it will soldier on until 6 Jan regardless. The discarded tree is of course symptomatic of residential areas of London. This afternoon, as the veggies neared completion in the oven and I looked out of the window, nothing but dark windows met the eye. I’ve very often felt that my boyfriend and I are the only people in these streets spending Christmas at home. It is this distinct lack of people which contributes to this noiseless, soft, gentle environment.
As I exited the building at 5pm to take the dogs to the toilet, it may as well have been 3am. I did see a couple of people further down the pavement from us, but mostly, it was reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic when 6pm in March looked like the middle of the night.
These days are so so so precious. Soon the city will empty of tourists and January will usher in the quietest London can be, even as the pace of life returns to its norm. I read one of my new books in one sitting this evening, such is the power of Christmas; when all is said and done, when all saddos have stopped littering my inbox with newsletters and offers that go straight in the bin unopened, there’s nothing in my life that quietens the mind quite as much as Christmas. And if you are reading this, I wish you a great day but most of all, I wish you peace.