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He has always been a man of a bigger-than-life figure. Witty, unsentimental – and hardly ever declining to an extra drink. Whenever our families celebrated, he is the person gossiping about the newest uproar to catch up with a regional politician, or entertaining us with stories of the notorious womanizing of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday during the last four decades.

It was common for us to pass the morning of Christmas Day with him and his family, before going our separate ways. But, one Christmas, some ten years back, when he was supposed to be meeting family abroad, he fell down the stairs, whisky in one hand, a suitcase gripped in the other, and broke his ribs. He was treated at the hospital and told him not to fly. Thus, he found himself back with us, doing his best to manage, but looking increasingly peaky.

As Time Passed

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 was unable to; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and was unsuccessful.

Thus, prior to me managing to placed a party hat on my head, we resolved to get him to the hospital.

We thought about calling an ambulance, but what would the wait time be on Christmas Day?

A Worrying Turn

By the time we got there, he’d gone from peaky to barely responsive. Other outpatients helped us get him to a ward, where the characteristic scent of clinical cuisine and atmosphere was noticeable.

What was distinct, however, was the mood. There were heroic attempts at festive gaiety everywhere you looked, even with the pervasive depressing and institutional feel; decorations dangled from IV poles and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on nightstands.

Positive medical attendants, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were working diligently and using that charming colloquial address so particular to the area: “duck”.

A Subdued Return Home

Once the permitted time ended, we headed home to chilled holiday sides and holiday television. We watched something daft on television, perhaps a detective story, and engaged in an even sillier game, such as a regionally-themed property trading game.

By then it was quite late, and it had begun to snow, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – did we lose the holiday?

Recovery and Retrospection

While our friend did get better in time, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and subsequently contracted a serious circulatory condition. And, although that holiday is not my most cherished memory, it has become part of family legend as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

If that is completely accurate, or a little bit of dramatic licence, is not for me to definitively say, but hearing it told each year has done no damage to my pride. True to his favorite phrase: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.