It’s the purpose of Christmas, in my opinion, to poke a thermometer into the thick of our lives and stare. Each year during the holidays we’re asked to be at our most vulnerable, to look about our person with wide, wobbling eyes and ask ‘who loves me?’. Santa Claus, Michael Bublé and flammable pudding are all the hand that waves about to distract us from the pain of this exposure.

It begins in sentiment, a rogue display of chocolate shaped like a family of reindeer or a viral ad about the friendship between a bear and a rabbit scored with Lily Allen’s cover of Somewhere only we know. It ends in the bathroom at a work Christmas party, or in a hushed promise to never speak to ‘those people’ again (your parents).