Debbie Johnson - A Gift from the Comfort Food Café - Celebrate Christmas in the cosy village of Budbury with the most heartwarming read of 2018!

It’s not an easy balance, and as soon as I am old enough, I go away to college to study nursing. I choose a college far enough away that I have to live in the halls, and think I have found paradise. Other teenagers are homesick – I’m just relieved. Relieved to have my own space, my own place, my own peace and quiet. Relieved to be alone.

By the time I am in my twenties, I’m sharing my own space and my own place and I don’t have much peace and quiet any more. I’m definitely, 100 per cent not alone, either.

In fact, the third time I run away, I’m a grown woman, with a six-month-old baby, a job, a rented flat, and a boyfriend who never really wanted to be a dad.

That time, I run away for good. That time, I run away because of yet another screaming row – with Jason, my boyfriend.

It isn’t pretty. These things never are. When we met, he was working as a hospital porter, and I was a nurse. At the time, I suppose I thought we fell in love – but now I see it for what it was. A lot of lust, some laughs, and a strange sense that this was what I was supposed to be doing. That women of my age should be looking to find ‘the one’ and building a relationship.

It was never, ever right between us, but when I got pregnant, we both pretended it was. Because everyone knows that having a newborn baby is really easy, and completely papers over the cracks in any relationship, don’t they?

Of course, it didn’t make anything better. It made everything worse. The flat was too small. We didn’t have enough money. We were too young, and didn’t have a clue what we were doing. Mainly, I think, we just didn’t like each other very much.

While I was pregnant, we were able to pretend much better. We went to Ikea and laughed as we built cots from Swedish instructions and cooed over tiny little baby-grows. He said he’d give up drinking while I was pregnant, and even managed it for a couple of weeks.

After our son, Saul, arrived, the tensions started to build. I never slept. Jason was working extra shifts. When we did see each other, we were both filled with seething resentments – me because I was stuck at home, him because when he did get home, all I did was moan and nag.

The only good thing about any of it was the baby. He was perfect – caught between us, this chubby-faced, blond-haired angel who I always secretly thought we didn’t deserve.

The night of the screaming row, I am especially tired. I’ve been on my own for so long, I’ve started talking to the kettle. It isn’t answering yet, but in my delirious state of fatigue, it’s only a matter of time.

Saul is teething and crying and irritable. Jason has been doing extra shifts to cover for other people’s Christmas leave, and I am watching the big hand crawl around the clock in the kitchen, counting the minutes until I can hand Saul over and collapse onto my bed and cry silently into my pillow for a few moments, wondering what happened to my life.

We’re out of nappies, and Jason is supposed to be getting some on the way home. Except he doesn’t come home – not for another two hours. And when he does, he smells of lager and cigarettes and Calvin Klein’s Obsession, which is a perfume I definitely don’t wear. In fact the only perfume I wear these days is baby sick and desperation.

I could overlook all of that if he’d even remembered the nappies – but of course he hasn’t. He has, though, remembered to pick up six cans of Fosters and a bad attitude.

I yell. He yells. We both say things we will regret, but also probably mean. It gets louder, and hotter, and angrier. We’re both like subterranean geysers, all of our frustrations rising to the surface in one big, scalding explosion.

I pick up the nearest thing I can find – a dirty nappy – and lob it at Jason’s head. He retaliates by slapping me so hard across the face I feel the red sting marks shine immediately.

We’re both stunned into silence by this; me standing still, holding my stinging cheek, him staring at me, shaking his head, stammering apologies.

I’m so sorry, he says. I don’t know what came over me, he says. It’ll never happen again, he promises. He is full of remorse, full of regret, full of instant self-loathing. In a strange way, I almost feel sorry for him – our situation has revealed a side of himself he probably never knew existed.

I am hurt, and shaken, and weirdly relieved. It’s like we’ve finally pushed ourselves over an abyss that we can’t climb out of. I don’t feel scared, oddly – I can tell he won’t do it again. Not this time, anyway.

I’m trying to make words come out of my mouth when I notice Saul. Saul, my beautiful son, who has been sitting in his baby chair, in a dirty nappy and a Baby’s First Christmas vest, watching all of this unfold.

His blue eyes are wide and wet, his pudgy fists held to his ears trying to block out the noise, so scared and confused he is screaming as well. He’s probably been screaming for a while – but neither of us noticed, because we were too lost in our own drama.

I rush to the baby to comfort him, and know that I will be running away again sometime soon – not for my sake, but for Saul’s. Maybe even for Jason’s.

Now, when I look back using the magical power of hindsight, it feels like so many of the important moments in my life – like that one – involve running away. I could draw a time-map of when things started to go wrong, and add in a cartoon figure of myself zooming off in the opposite direction, vapour trails behind me.

The problem with all of these memories – all of these actions and reactions and inactions and overreactions – isn’t really the running away. The problem is, I never had any clue what I was running towards, and usually found myself blown around by the breeze, like the fluff from one of those wispy dandelion heads, without any sense of direction and no control over my own movements.

Now, a few years have passed. Saul will be four on his next birthday, and life is very different. I’m less of a dandelion-head, and am trying very hard to take root.

It’s different because the last time I ran away, I ran here – to a little place called Budbury, on the picture-postcard perfect coast of Dorset. I have a job. I have a tiny house. I have friends, who I’ve reluctantly allowed into my life. I have a community, in the Comfort Food Café that is the heart of the village. I have peace, and quiet, and most importantly, I have a gorgeously healthy little boy. Who definitely disrupts the quiet, but in a good way.

I have more than I could ever have imagined – and this time, I won’t be running anywhere. This time, I am breaking all the cycles.

This time, I’m staying put – no matter how complicated it gets.

This year, Christmas Eve night

I’ve had enough. My head is pounding, and my eyes are sore, and every inch of my body from my scalp to my toes feels like it’s clenched up in tension.

All I can hear is the screaming, rising in shrieks and peaks above the sound of festive music, a playlist of carols I have on my phone to try and drown it all out. The mix is horrendous: the sublime choruses of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ alternating with yells of abuse.