25/12/2025
I love this 🩷
If you're feeling a bit sad this Christmas, I need to tell you something... 👇🏾
Several years ago I was working in a call centre in Manchester on Christmas Day for a company called LateRooms - booking strangers into hotels while they travelled to see their families.
My shift ended at 10pm. I walked home to my room in Moss Side, Manchester, knowing that I was back in the call centre early tomorrow, and I spent the night feeling really sorry for myself about the reality of my life...
I made the mistake of opening Instagram.
Everyone's perfect Christmas. The matching pyjamas. The table with fifteen people round it. The feast. The boyfriend surprising his girlfriend with the Pandora bracelet. Kids losing their minds over presents.
I stirred powdered oats into lukewarm water for Christmas dinner (see the actual picture below). My brother Jason Bartlett had given me a bag of it months earlier "for emergencies."
The loneliness was palpable.
A decade later, that night in Moss Side feels like a completely different life now.
Not because it made me stronger or any of that motivational stuff, but because it made me understand something I've never forgotten in my hardest times:
Life happens in seasons.
Within a year my life was different, within 2 years completely different again, within a few more years I was living in a different country, in love with a wonderful woman, surrounded by 10+ family members on Christmas Day, nieces and nephews and living a life that I feel deeply grateful to live.
Life can change so quickly!!!! Even within a year things can look unrecognisably different.
One day - and it could be next Christmas, could be in five years - you'll be somewhere completely different, surrounded by people you haven't even met yet, living a life you can't imagine right now, and you'll think about the Christmas you spent feeling lonely, unhappy or unfortunate and you'll be weirdly grateful for it... because it taught you you about seasons, and that winter comes before summer.
Merry Christmas 🎄❤️
Sending my love to you and your loved ones and thank you for a beautiful year!