Are you all ready for Christmas? ask complete strangers as they serve you at checkouts or the pharmacy counter.

Yes, almost, I want to lie to the white-coated assistant, between gritted teeth. Just pass me a bottle of your own brand hemlock and I can cross the last item off my list. I’m planning a very quiet Christmas for myself this year, you see.

In fact, I really have been planning a very quiet Christmas this year, if a hemlock-free one. For years, I’ve approached Christmas with all the cheer of a reindeer going down with flu. You know you’ve got a job to do, and you know you’re going to do it, but after the pies are baked and presents picked and batteries bought and pheasants plucked you’re going to make your excuses and head for your bed, armed only with a dose of exhaustion and an even bigger dose of self-pity.

But this year is going to be different. The complex equation that encapsulates our family’s whereabouts – where x = my mother and y = my sister’s house – means that this year we find ourselves at home alone in Wiltshire for Christmas.

Lovely as it is to be with extended family, staying at home alone-ish has its advantages.

No having to get up at 6am to start warming up an enormous turkey, for a start. No feeling obliged to get up again at nine, and put on some makeup and wear earrings in the shape of angels and smile a lot.

No need, even, to pack the presents up properly on Christmas Eve with sticky bows and labels with illegible writing, thanks to a dodgy pen or that half price sloe gin. Just wrap a bit of paper round them and stick them in carrier bags under the tree, one bag for each of us.

In fact, come to think of it….. no need to actually buy any presents for each other at all, is there? This thought edges its way into my brain as I’m standing in a queue, waiting to pay for a secret Santa present for a colleague. Once I’ve paid for this, all I have to do is start scaling the foothills of the mountain that is my husband’s gift list.

And, as ever, there’ll be a similar list for me in his wallet, waiting for the lunch hour when he can slip out of work and relieve our joint current account of a three figure sum.

And on Christmas day itself, we’ll open them all and nod appreciatively and then get down to the real business of the festive season which is of course eating and drinking and watching It’s a Wonderful Life again. And forget about the presents completely.

Why don’t we skip presents to each other this year, I say to my husband that evening. If we did, we could put the money to a new mattress instead.

I know his Achilles heel. A new mattress is something that he has been saying we need for years. No, decades even. And he’s got a point. Our desperately old, thin mattress would, quite frankly, not have passed muster among the shepherds turning up at the cattle shed behind the inn.

But now that there’s a John Lewis at Home within driving distance of our house, a new mattress has become a real possibility. In fact, we’ve already spent a few hours in there, comparing the virtues of horsehair and revolutionary springs and lying primly side by side in public as if we scarcely know each other.

I can see he’s interested. His back and shoulders have suffered the nasty mattress long enough. The only thing is, he says, is I’ve already bought you several presents.

How cruel fate can be. Still, if we don’t spend anything else, we can just about manage the mattress.

So I won’t have anything to open on Christmas day, then, he asks.

But you will be able to slope off to bed and enjoy your self-pity in comfort, I point out.