Twenty-five years ago I came to work in England, and in the week before Christmas, I walked around the streets of London, my eyes wide open in amazement. I had never seen such display, such window dressing, such conspicuous wealth. Chauffeurs drew up outside Harrod's, Harvey Nicholl's and Liberty to drop women with long coats and long blonde hair who never thanked them, but called out that they should only be an hour or so, and to keep cruising around if there was no parking.
Restaurants were full to bursting, taxis unavailable, the gift selections in newspapers like some wish list at a Santa's Grotto for millionaires. The travel agencies vied with each other to produce more and more exotic Christmas packages in the Caribbean. The cookery columns suggested you send your friends hampers. Compared with back home, it was awesome. How had these people become so affluent? The difference between Them and Us was staggering.
And then there was the Winter of Discontent, with its power cuts, three-day week and miners' strikes. After that, the country considered itself somehow rescued by the Thatcher years. During that time, the have nots gradually became more apparent. Crisis at Christmas provided frightening numbers of people, ready and eager to crowd into some huge cavernous hall for a few slices of turkey and three nights' lodging. More and more of our own countrymen and women were sleeping under bridges and on the gratings so as to get the heat coming up from the kitchens of the Savoy hotel.
There was still, however, the impression that the British economy was booming and that it was better to be here than in the island next door, where there was no chance at all. And the haves still went shopping and to their serious office lunches, gave each other corporate hospitality and took weekends in the country. A quarter of a century later, the nation of shopkeepers has begun to panic.
Last weekend was supposed to be the litmus paper for the season. If the crowds were out, if the shops were full . . . then, the rush was on, the season was saved. But I was in London for that weekend, and before the newspaper doom reports were published, I could have told you that nothing was saved. The Bumper Christmas is just not being delivered in the city where the Irish once thought they were digging for gold in the streets.
True, the traffic was fairly snarled but there was no trouble getting a taxi and the big stores in the high streets were announcing sales. And this 10 days before Christmas?
Shops had even hired barkers to shout out their value in some places, calling out that all perfumes were one-third off. There were huge neon signs, saying £20 off all cashmere sweaters. Toyshops had notices saying "Prices Slashed". Electronic stores were offering "Gigantic Discounts". The restaurants were empty. The owner of one restaurant, where we used to have to book in October for an office outing, nearly came out on to the footpath to drag me in. And when I did go in for a dutiful glass of strega, they told me they would have to let two of the staff go in the new year, and people were now buying crisps and cheap wine and having the office lunch on site in their own places as it were. The decorations and the Easy Choose menu had all been in vain.
THE postman on this road went back to a house and said: "Sorry mate, you gave me a tenner by mistake." The man had intended a tenner alright, but nobody else had given him more than a fiver this year. He had been in Ireland a week ago for a mate's stag party, and postmen there told him they got at least a tenner from everyone.
A woman whose milk bill is £1.90 sterling a week has told the milkman to keep the extra 10 pence each time, which will give him a nice round £5.20 at the end of the year.
A single woman, now 40, who left Ireland 23 years ago to have her daughter quietly and discreetly in London, says that one of her unmarried nieces back home has two children and thereby got a flat in Dublin. The other niece is expecting. "There seems to be nothing but delight about these new babies. Life seems to be all about timing," she says grimly. At the hairdresser's, two of the stylists had been to Ireland; a company that made hair products had invited a group of them over to test a product. They had never been to Dublin before, and they just couldn't believe it. The style, the buzz, the goods in the shops, the prices and the numbers of people having full colour in the salons. It was out of sight. It was like what they thought New York would be like. Great place to live they said.
WELL, we always knew it was, of course, but like a parent whose toddler is praised at school, it's good to have it confirmed. A quarter of a century ago, when I walked through the streets of London, I could never have seen that there would be such a switch in terms of boom, and to be fair, neither did the economists. It's nothing to gloat over. There's no reason to rejoice that the city next door isn't doing as well as we are. In the London of those times, there were always many that fell through the great net of success, as there are now in Ireland.
There were people in London then who bought property thinking it would never drop in value. The for sale signs still flutter in the wind to prove that particular hope wrong. There is nobody who doesn't know somebody who had to sell for much less than they paid.
That could happen at home too. If we look at the lean days of a London Christmas, it should not be with any sense of one-up-manship; it should be to learn a possible lesson.
But mainly in the season of happiness, it should be a source of pride and pleasure to us that our own country is so genuinely the envy of the world, not only in terms of prosperity, which can come and go, but in its determined efforts to create peace and find a fairer society - and in its self-confidence, its talent and its youth.
Twenty-five years on, with a lump in my throat, I realise what a lot I have to be thankful for in the place to which I am coming home for Christmas.