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don’t begrudge those poor starving little children!’ I’d said.
    ‘Not at all. But the cost of putting a carol service on in the first place will cost a fortune. Why don’t you have a small family Christmas and just donate the money directly to the charity instead of killing the fatted calf for those poor starving little children?’
    ‘Who do you think I am? Bob Geldof?’ I’d snapped.
    ‘No – but I don’t know who you think you are. Your front garden isn’t St Paul’s Cathedral on Christmas Eve,’ she’d snapped back. She was always better than me in arguments was our Sam.
    And here I was, no parties, no carol singers, no bloody lawn for that matter. I was just a crumpled heap, leaning on my island in my clotted cream designer kitchen, drinking last summer’s sherry and wondering what the hell was going to happen next.
    Sam hadn’t got a clue. She thought my life was easy, like it was all just one lovely long lunch, but it was a constant battle. My social circle was highly competitive and if you weren’t struggling to keep your husband, you were competing with kids’ school results, party kudos and charity functions. I lived in a place where footballers’ wives mixed with regional TV royalty, and since the Salford influx from the BBC, we were positively awash with new money and WAG glamour. Everyone wanted theirs to be the glitziest evening, the sunniest garden party, the finest charity lunch.
    Christmas was the most punishing. Every year it was the same, you had to have the best location, the finest food and the glitziest baubles on the biggest tree. It was relentless and fickle, you were only as good as your last Christmas canapé - and quite honestly, though I hadn’t admitted it to anyone, the mere thought of another round of bloody Christmas balls (in every sense of the word) filled me with dread. My friends would have been amazed to hear it didn’t make me happy. I gave nothing away – and people marvelled at my Christmases, which had a different theme every year. Once my ‘Victorian Christmas’ was in a double-page feature in Cheshire Life . ‘A bewitching Victorian-themed Christmas in the £2m home bedecked with vintage baubles and filled with a boisterous family and tinkling laughter,’ it read. The reality had been a little different. Simon had been working late at the office – again! And so I’d ‘borrowed’ Mrs J’s son for the shoot and told him to keep his back to the camera. I remember sitting there with the journalist while the photographer snapped away, thinking how it summed up my life. Everything was fake, from the feigned festive joy to the caring, present husband.
    But this year I really hoped things might be different.
    I’d seen less and less of Simon in recent months which he’d put down to pressure of work, but I knew it was more than that. Only the night before the bailiffs arrived I’d found him hidden in his study having a hushed conversation on the phone. He quickly clicked the phone off as I walked in and refused to tell me who he’d been speaking to. I’d had an uneasy feeling deep in the pit of my stomach and stormed straight back to our bedroom. I’d grabbed my bespoke pillows and gone to one of the spare rooms. But I couldn’t sleep and on discovering the Vogue December issue I’d pored over the festive gloss, turning the pages of a lavish turkey dinner, champagne served in crystal and a perfect model wife and mother presiding over it all. Despite my own faked Christmases of a photo-shopped husband and borrowed children, I couldn’t help myself and part of me still bought into the dream. I wanted to be that perfectly groomed, smooth-haired woman in her glitzy top and black velvet trousers. She was laughing, her mouth open showing perfect teeth with effortless glamour. She wasn’t insecure in her marriage and stressed about the festive season, she was comfortable with herself and sure of her husband. Those glossed lips were saying, ‘I am the