wo things happened that Christmas in the late 70s; my Auntie Marj was involved in both. Marj was one of my nan’s sisters. She lived with a lot of cats on the Coventry Road in Birmingham. She had a big personality and a frame to match – there was a lot of her to love. Her catchphrases were: “You’ve got to laugh,” and “I’ve never seen the like in all my nudge.” Nudge? She had a ferocious, wheezy laugh, which would often give her cause to fish in her bag for a large, primitive black inhaler device for her asthma. She’d pump away at this to settle things down before resuming frivolities. I was sitting on the floor playing a game with my brother when she arrived that Christmas morning. I must have been about 11. “Stand up, Ade,” she said. “Let’s have a look at you. I heard you’re getting fat.” I was horrified. If I hadn’t been sitting on the floor, I might have fallen over. Unsteadily, I stood up, as commanded, for my assessment. “Hmm, you’re not too bad,” Marj said, and off she went. I ran upstairs and examined myself in the full-length mirror in the bathroom. Was I fat? I supposed I must have been if Marj had been told as much, but by whom? It can only have been by members of my family. I certainly felt fat now, even though, looking back at photos, I wasn’t. At first, disconsolate and ashamed, I barely touched my Christmas dinner. But before long I was frantically stuffing my face. This has been my eating pattern ever since. One way or another, I’ve always been somewhere between slightly and very overweight. I don’t blame Marj for this, by the way. But, given the horror I felt then and continue to feel about being overweight, I’ll never understand why since that day it has led me to eat more, not less. We had always had a nice open fire in our living room, and every Christmas afternoon we’d all sit there watching the television and occasionally glancing approvingly at the flames. My dad, however, had long been muttering something about open fires being “inefficient, because the heat all goes straight up the chimney”. Eventually, he ripped out the very nice open fire and replaced it with a stove thing. This was the stove thing’s first Christmas. “Ooh, Peter,” Auntie Marj demanded. “What have you done with your lovely fire?” My dad’s heat inefficiency explanation didn’t butter her Christmas parsnips. “It was such a lovely fire,” she lamented over and over, until it found the rhythm of an incantation. To make matters worse, Dad couldn’t get the bloody thing going properly. It would start up OK, but then fade. Luckily, Marj was monitoring the situation. “It’s dying again, Pete,” she said. Up my dad would get, fiddle with some lever at the base of the stove and throw ever more combustible matter into it. Marj, meanwhile, continued to drip petrol on to the flames of Dad’s frustration. I’d never seen him lose his temper, but I could see his temperature was rising faster than the fire’s. This went on all afternoon and into the night: she’d say it was dying, he’d have a fiddle, and on it gently – too gently – burned. Eventually, well into the Morecambe and Wise phase of the evening, the fire was finally glowing nicely, but Marj wasn’t for turning. “I really miss the old one,” she insisted. “I think it’s nice to really see the flames.” At this, my dad completely lost it. He flung open the doors of the stove and started flinging in paper, kindling, matches and anything else he could find to give Auntie Marj the flames she desired. He did so with such ferocity that red hot coals spilled out on to the carpet, but now his adrenaline was running so high, he just picked them up with his bare hands and threw them back in. He then slammed the doors shut and stormed off to the kitchen. There, in an unusual gesture of fury, he whipped his glasses off and threw them at the wall, uttering a word I’ve only ever heard him use that once. Mercifully, an alarmed Marj now gave it a rest. What was left of the evening passed peacefully enough. Later, as Dad loaded the dishwasher, I caught him wincing with the pain of his burnt fingers. We laughed until it hurt. So how did that Christmas day change me? Well, I heard a hard truth for the first time, that 40 years later I still haven’t dealt with. And I also learned that any day that ends with you and your dad laughing your arses off can’t have been that bad.