It’s going to take some willpower to go out there. The winter has put its grey lid on the day, it’s -5C and the housing estate I live on is looking particularly dismal – but I know it holds a treasure worth seeing. We bundle me up in as many layers as we can find, manoeuvre me into my wheelchair and gasp as the sharp air finds our lungs. The streets are damp, unnaturally still, and it makes us quiet. “That way,” I whisper, pointing. Early afternoon in midwinter is a strange, liminal time on the estate. As we walk, the only people we see have hard eyes and hard faces, and they soon disappear, like the blackbirds who skulk and fly low into the bare municipal hedges. I have steered us down a long row of dark terraces that have tiny paved front areas, each one like a miniature junkyard. Nondescript shrubs battle with bins and empty planters that hold the dried and iced ghosts of summer. There’s an abandoned fridge, a sofa spilling its innards, and remarkably few signs of Christmas. “Keep going,” I urge, “it’s just up here.” And there it is: my treasure. An impossible sight in a seemingly dead world. A beautyberry – Callicarpa americana. It stretches high above my wheelchair from one of the dirty yards, its bare branches festooned with nature’s baubles: hundreds and hundreds of bright magenta berries, glowing with their own secret light. Here is Christmas, at last. Here is hope. Metallic sugar balls, frosty and plump, clumped in clusters like psychedelic blackberries. Their purple is pure eccentric confidence, pure defiance. I think of Good King Wenceslas, of wise men’s gifts, of cupcakes and cheap community-centre tinsel. I think of everything good, benevolent and jolly; of all who are willing to cheerfully spend time with what’s lowly and lost, and not give up on its goodness. Ten minutes in its presence and we are renewed. We begin to wheel home through the icy grey, laughing at how beautifully the sagging inflatable Santa Claus next door has been upstaged.