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Our family friend has always been a truly outsized personality. Witty, unsentimental – and hardly ever declining to a further glass. At family parties, he’s the one discussing the latest scandal to catch up with a local MP, or amusing us with accounts of the notorious womanizing of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday for forty years.

Frequently, we would share the holiday morning with him and his family, before going our separate ways. Yet, on a particular Christmas, some ten years back, when he was supposed to be meeting family abroad, he tumbled down the staircase, with a glass of whisky in hand, suitcase in the other, and broke his ribs. Medical staff had treated him and told him not to fly. So, here he was back with us, making the best of it, but appearing more and more unwell.

The Day Progressed

The morning rolled on but the stories were not coming as they usually were. He maintained that he felt alright but he didn’t look it. He endeavored to climb the stairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, cautiously, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.

So, before I’d so much as put on a festive hat, my mum and I decided to get him to the hospital.

The idea of calling for an ambulance crossed our minds, but how much of a delay would there be on Christmas Day?

A Deteriorating Condition

By the time we got there, he had moved from being peaky to barely responsive. People in the waiting room aided us guide him to a ward, where the generic smell of hospital food and wind filled the air.

The atmosphere, however, was unique. There were heroic attempts at holiday cheer in every direction, despite the underlying sterile and miserable mood; decorations dangled from IV poles and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on bedside tables.

Cheerful nurses, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were moving busily and using that great term of endearment so unique to the area: “duck”.

A Quiet Journey Back

Once the permitted time ended, we made our way home to cold bread sauce and festive TV programming. We viewed something silly on television, probably Agatha Christie, and engaged in an even sillier game, such as a regionally-themed property trading game.

By then it was quite late, and snowing, and I remember feeling deflated – did we lose the holiday?

Recovery and Retrospection

Even though he ultimately healed, he had actually punctured a lung and later developed a serious circulatory condition. And, even if that particular Christmas isn’t a personal favourite, it has gone down in family lore as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

How factual that statement is, or a little bit of dramatic licence, is not for me to definitively say, but hearing it told each year has definitely been good for my self-esteem. In keeping with our friend’s motto: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.