CHRISTMAS.

Christmas is the time for families and for celebration, but to me it is always a constant reminder of my strained relationship with my mum, you see folks it was a few Christmasses ago I had the brilliant(!) idea of paying for a holiday for the pair of us, the location was a beautiful self-catering Georgian apartment in a market town near to home - this maybe not everybody's cup of tea but for me and my mum this should have been an home from home experience as we are both really homebodies but I thought for once (especially now it is just the two of us and no other family members alive) we could go away to a place that was special to us both.  So I paid for the holiday after mum agreed that she would like to go, you can imagine my shock when we were ready to leave on the Sunday that she didn't want to go, she even tried to tell me that the holiday owners will not have taken the money out of my bank account so we could stay at home for the festive season.  For the first time ever in living memory mum was wrong and yes folks the money had been debited from my account, so I put my foot down and said to mum we will need to go as the cash had already gone and it was a lot of £££ personally for me to waste - so later the next day mum and I packed our stuff, loaded the car and we went to the apartment - mum stayed with me for a maximum of twenty minutes, she had a cup of coffee before going back home and leaving me there on my own.  This was the first ever Christmas I had been on my own and it changed my relationship with my mum forever.