Not a lot of people know this, but before I became an author my job was to ‘deliver Christmas’. In my home town of Bournemouth at least. No, I wasn’t Santa, nor one of his Elves, but somehow I found myself running a not-for-profit company that worked with the shops in the town to fund events to make it more attractive to shoppers. And since the shops make most of their money at Christmas, that meant I had to deliver Christmas.

More specifically, I was tasked with making Bournemouth, which is a coastal town known for summer holidays, feel like a Christmassy kind of place. And quite remarkably, given my complete lack of experience in any sort of event management, I was trusted with a budget of nearly six hundred thousand pounds to do so. Those that know me well understand I am very bad with money, so this was quite a risk.

When I began, Bournemouth’s ‘Christmas Experience’ consisted of a few sad strings of fairy lights strung between lamp posts. In some places they were accompanied by elderly animated decorations. These were mostly unremarkable, except for one which appeared to feature Father Christmas enthusiastically pleasuring himself, and which locals nicknamed the ‘wanking santa’. Upon closer inspection he was merely waving to passing children, but you had to look closely to see that.

So my little team and I decided we would sweep all this away and replace it with something wonderful. Although Bournemouth is a seaside town, it’s also well known for its gardens, around which the town centre is arranged. In summer they’re beautiful – a place for picnics late into the evenings. In the winter they were dark and cold and few people felt safe walking through them. Our plan was to fill the gardens with light, in a free six-week Christmas festival.

We planned an ice rink, and exciting, interactive illuminations to bring colour and light to the dark heart of the town. In a nod to the fact that Bournemouth is where beach huts first appeared (bet you didn’t know that) we built ten ‘light huts’ – beach hut shells filled with interactive light experiences to be dotted around the gardens. And none of them involved masturbating Christmas figures.

But my God was it a struggle. The local council has responsibility for issuing permissions for events in the town. But it also runs several major events, and its Event Management Team were somewhat disgruntled that the task of organising this one hadn’t fallen to them. Consequently they ignored our naïve pleas that we could work together for the good of the town, and set about their authorisation remit with sudden vigour. Every document, certificate or assessment that could possibly be required was suddenly essential for the safety of the people of Bournemouth. We had to apply for and comply with full planning permission, as if our small temporary huts would be in place for sixty years. We needed environmental impact assessments (7000 pages long). We needed flood risk assessments. We had to have fire safety assessment made for trees. We had to demonstrate how we had considered and mitigated the risks of an earthquake hitting the town, or our event being overrun by volcanic lava.

My first response was to create this wall of paperwork myself, but I was soon informed that my own creative writing efforts weren’t appreciated, and that qualified professionals would be required to produce it all. And so a large chunk of our £600,000 was therefore diverted away from fun stuff for people, towards expensive documents that would never be read by a living soul. Consequently the plans for the gardens had to shrink, Nevertheless, in year one we delivered a small but cute ice-rink, surrounded by a reasonable area of colourful lighting, and our ten huts. It met a mixed reaction from the town, some appreciated the effort, others were underwhelmed by the gap between the ambition and the reality. But though I didn’t realise it then, it set an expectation. The town would do something for Christmas. It was no longer acceptable for the gardens to be left cold and empty.

In year two the ice rink grew, the huts came back, bigger and better, I gained my first grey hairs, and nobody in the council’s Parks and Gardens department would talk to me because of what they said I’d done to their grass. In year three it started to actually look like a Christmas Experience. But by the fourth year I realised that my role, in bribing the elected councillors with biscuits and trying to convince people I was in control of the budget when I wasn’t, was a lot less fun than what the creative people were doing. They could just get on with designing the interactive experiences in the first place. Or building them. I’d long known I wanted to do something creative with my life, but it wasn’t until I found myself working close up with a team of brilliant designers that I realised I just had to do it.

So I resigned. I told everyone it was to be a stay-at-home dad while my partner went back to work (she’s an engineer, so she had a proper job anyway). Surprisingly few of my colleagues begged me to stay, or even seemed particularly upset, but I barely noticed that as I set about enacting my top-secret plan – to write, to be creative. It took me a year to produce anything, partly because Rafa and Alba were just so childish. (I mean, could they not change their own nappy just once?) But in the end I managed to finish a book. I called it The Wave at Hanging Rock (and I’m told it makes an excellent Christmas gift…)

Writing became, and has remained, my focus ever since. And I’m delighted and amazed with how well it’s gone. But I still feel a twinge of guilt sometimes that I didn’t stay on to keep building the Bournemouth Christmas Experience.

I’m thinking about all this because I went into Bournemouth last week, to visit this year’s Bournemouth Christmas experience. It features beautiful and colourfully lit trees, in the gardens, all around a very Christmassy ice rink. And it’s all very lovely. It’s now run by the council’s Event Management team, in a happy partnership with my old not-for-profit company. We got there in the end.

When we visited there were thousands of happy people enjoying the atmosphere and admiring the lights, and as I walked around I realised it was the first time I could just be one of them, without worrying about how much it all cost and whether I had fully mitigated the risk of an escaped lion suddenly rampaging through the crowds. It brought about a strange mix of emotions, a resurfacing of my guilt for having walked away, some relief that more capable people had taken over. But mostly just a sense of profound gratitude that I’m able to do what I do today.

And so, as we get down to the business end of December, I thought that rather than send any old Christmas message of goodwill, I’d send you this story, along with some photos of the Bournemouth Christmas Experience through the years. As an alternative Christmas message, and my way of saying thank you.

Thank you to everyone who’s chosen to read one of my books this year. Thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to write with messages of support. Thank you for the reviews, for the beta reading, for the recommendations to book clubs and to friends that they might try one of the stories. Thank you for letting me do something I’m reasonably well suited to, rather than something I’m so demonstrably not!

I really hope your Christmas is packed full of laugher, and family and friends, and that’s there’s something decent on TV this year. And if, like I was, you find yourself stuck doing something that isn’t quite right, I hope 2020 is the year you’re able to change it up and get onto the right track.

And even if not, I hope you have a wonderful 2020 filled with new adventures and experiences that make you feel alive.

Merry Christmas and a very happy new year!

Gregg