Families are great but so is freedom, says VANESSA FELTZ
After all the festive family-flavoured fun, who doesn’t have a sneaking sympathy for pregnant actress and chanteuse Sheridan Smith, 38? In a moment of imprudent clarity she posted the following on Twitter on New Year’s Day: “In-laws eh?! Merry ****ing Xmas”.
She followed it with the meme “You can’t choose your family but you can choose your therapist” before coming to her senses and removing the lot mere minutes later. Poor Sheridan. Poor in-laws. And poor Jamie Horn, 30, the boyfriend stuck in the middle.
Frankly, now we’ve all returned to the grindstone and can look back with a modicum of perspective, may compassion be extended to the whole flipping loved-up, crazily cross, frustrated, blood-is-thicker-than-water, lot of us.
I rocked out Yule and Chanukah – they coincided this year – with daughters, sons-in-law and grandkids in beautiful, rainbow-bestrewn East Cork.
Miraculously, we managed 18 days and nights of concentrated revelry without a full-scale fracas.
Just how we accomplished that monumental feat remains a mystery.
We were living out my Dallas fantasies in an Irish incarnation of the Ewings’ Southfork Ranch.
Ever since I fell for dastardly JR I’ve longed for a family pile, one kitchen for all, soup simmering on the hearth, baby cooing, four- and five-year-olds charmingly fashioning a collage out of pasta, one daughter baking, the other shelling peas, sons-in-law chopping logs and flying drones and yours truly dispensing wisdom and bon mots while looking supremely elegant in a fetching twin-set and pearls.
The reality of prolonged exposure to one’s nearest and dearest is now less Hallmark card, more EastEnders.
There’s a reason grown-up offspring flee the nest.
They have to escape the coop to preserve their sanity and save their parents from civil war.
Gather descendants in one place, mix in the inevitable lurgy that besieges any adult who comes within kissing distance of any child under 10, sprinkle in the courses of antibiotics (in our case six out of eight of us were knocking back the penicillin) the broken nights, eyes glued together with pernicious conjunctivitis which was the Christmas gift that went on giving – and you have the ideal breeding ground for a tweet like Sheridan’s.