The picture accompanying today’s column is of my Mum and me in December 1961.
I was six years old, and this was my first post-adoption Christmas: a time when I was still adjusting to life outside the orphanage and trying to make sense of a world which remained entirely new and difficult for me.
I hadn’t settled at that point. How could I? I had no memories whatsoever of my 18 months in the orphanage, nor the four and a half years before that.
No memories of people or places. And no certainties about what would come next.
Is this what my life was to be: stay somewhere for a while, then forget all about it before moving somewhere else to begin the peripatetic process all over again?
But take a look at that woman in the photograph. Her name is Margaret Adelaide Kane. Her face radiates beauty, kindness, determination and courage.
She was born on December 30 1917, and had just turned 44. She had married my Dad, Sam, on June 9 1945, and gone on to become one of the first orthoptists in Ireland.
To follow that career – and even her marriage – she had had to defy her parents. And defy them she did.
They weren’t able to have children and that’s what led them to me.
I had a squint (thank goodness, or we would never have crossed paths) and was given an appointment to have my eyes checked; by her, as it happened.
I was five at the time and she was able to make a connection with me that no-one else had been able to make. So much of a connection, in fact, that she decided she wanted to adopt me.
It was a huge step to take for a middle-aged couple (she was 43 and Sam was 54) with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. It probably wouldn’t be allowed today.
Professionals connected to the orphanage advised against it. Some of their friends advised against it.
Years later, after she had died – a month short of her 86th birthday – a very old friend of hers told me: “She fought for you. She fought like a tigress fighting for her cub. She was determined that you were not going to be left in either the orphanage you were in, or any other. You got lucky with her.”
I did get lucky with her. And this photograph is one of my favourites.
I was still in my own little world, but she was clearly strong enough at that point – about six months after I’d left the orphanage and with the final transfer papers of confirmation still to be signed – to love me, protect me and keep me close.
Christmas, even for the bah humbug brigade, can be a special time. A time for magic. A time for that something very special to happen.
Not, perhaps, a miracle as such, but certainly the sort of happenstance or serendipity that changes people in the right way.
All of which explains why I can’t look at this photograph of my Mum and not see magic in action.
Even when she was almost halfway through her 80s she still had that look. That twinkle. That hint – actually it was usually a great big dollop – of odds-defying mischief when she had her mind set on something.
And the something she had her mind set on in that photograph is me: a notice of intent to destiny that this was not to be her last Christmas with me.
Happily, we had an awful lot more together. And even though she became slower and more forgetful, she never lost that sense of ‘don’t mess with me'.
She travelled a lot after my Dad died – in 1977 – and spent 20 years in France, in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, just outside Nice, where Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was filmed.
She spent at least three evenings a week in the casino, playing bridge, which she was incredibly good at (she partnered Omar Sharif on a couple of occasions); and because she didn’t want to become the stereotypical British patriot, she became fluent in French within a year, having barely been able to speak a word beforehand.
She was an extraordinary woman. Travelling her own path, while keeping an eye out for anyone who needed help. And she gave a lot of it to a lot of people.
But the most extraordinary thing she did was rescue a terrified boy from an orphanage and provide him with the chance to reboot his life by taking a without-guarantees chance on him.
It’s an almost perfect Christmas story of how potential tragedy was turned into great hope, love, opportunity and, dare I say it again, sheer magic.
She was the perfect gift for me: the gift of a new beginning.
The happiness I have today is entirely her doing.
Happy Christmas everyone!