MY MUM’S A FIBBER

Three hundred Elves, Mum tells me. It takes that many to read all the letters. It’s mostly dark in Reindeerland, she says, but the Elves stay cheery by humming carols and drinking milk and eating gingerbread. She’s very excited and hardly stops talking. I like to see her happy, so I won’t tell her I know Santa doesn’t have that many Elves.

Creative Journey

He’s more famous than Sean Connery, more loved than Nelson Mandela, more elusive than Howard Hughes, with housebreaking skills second to none. The fact that no-one has ever seen the Big Guy does nothing to diminish his popularity.

Evidence suggests he’s a cheerful, portly fellow from Reindeerland with an army of cheery helper Elves, but despite having its own postcode and the largest volume of mail anywhere on the planet, no-one has ever been there.

It’s a mystery that’s baffled greater men that I, and so for my 26 Postcodes piece, I chose not to examine the location itself, but to look at two interested parties; a young son and his mother, in the lead up to Santa’s annual visit.

The mother, desperate to hang on to the magic of the Christmas story, tries to convince her son that Santa is real, as she knows her boy is getting to the age when he’ll no longer believe.

But thankfully he’s not quite there yet.