Bragging friends' Christmas newsletters make me want to write my own antidote

You know the sort of thing. Those hideous, back slapping, smug round robins that are churned out once a year from friends, usually at Christmas, just to tell you how wonderful their life is.

I use the term “friends” quite lightly here as very often you have not spoken to these ghastly people for at least a decade and they have forgotten the names of your children, so they use “family” to cover up their faux pas.

Anyway, this newsletter began something like this: “As another year draws to an end, I find myself sitting here in our ten-bedroom mansion to take a few minutes to tell you how brilliant Barbados was last month, how gifted our little children Eugene, Martha and Annie are, as well as recommending the “Suzuki” method for the violin as darling Arabella is flourishing and we have bought a new yacht after dear Kenneth made a killing on the Stock Exchange in June.”

And so it goes on. My friend’s tale reminded me of an “anniversary newsletter” I received six weeks after my "party" in February, from a girl I met at university – a million years ago - marking her seven years of marriage.

Yes, apparently seven years is a major milestone. Ok, it is seven years more than my own marriage lasted, but still. The timing of the said anniversary newsletter, which was full of pretty, glossy, shiny happy photographs of the modern day Bogart and Bacall, could not have landed on my doormat at a worse time. I was feeling a bit fragile and bleak and didn’t know whether to toss the newsletter off a cliff or jump myself. The newsletter got it, of course.

Anyway, as my friend recounted excerpts of her “newsletter” yesterday, which was incidentally from someone she used to waitress with when she was 18 years old, I decided that I would be writing my own this year.

It will read something like this and I will probably bullet point: I got married. I got separated. The child finally switched off her Xbox and left her bedroom to go to Berlin. Dad moved in for two weeks in July. Dad is still here.

I went to Spain on Ryanair.

I came home. I got a horrible cold in September. My cough is still here. My beautiful dog has become very naughty indeed. The cats eat a lot and are very expensive to care for.

But the biggest blow this year was finding out that the first piece of designer clothing I ever bought in 1992 (a cut and slash tee by Vivienne Westwood) after frivolously spending my all my education grant is now worth about £2,500.

I have been using it as a duster for the last ten years, instead of preserving it in cold storage, to be auctioned at a later date.

Gutted.

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