When I was a child, we always spent Christmas at my uncle’s. “Ogre” is a strong word, but everyone was scared of him. He had an insane number of rules. He would come to fetch us in his car – then insist we leave the dog behind in case he scratched the upholstery. It was never obvious when children were meant to speak and when they weren’t. If you chose the wrong time to go to the loo, you would get a 20-minute peroration on every 18th century print lining the stairs. I cannot tell you how uninterested I was in the window tax, which was another of his favourite subjects.

There were tons of unspoken rules about nice stuff, such as where you could put a chair leg so it didn’t leave a dent in the rug, where you could put a drink down and which was the right cloth to clean the table with (it transpired, over a period of some years, that there was no right cloth; there was a tiny battery-powered vacuum cleaner for detritus, and a chamois for high shine). There was an electric carving knife that made everyone tense. There are just so many things that can go wrong between an unevenly shaped carcass and a vibrating serrated blade.

He was my mother’s brother – my parents were separated – and disapproved very strongly of my father, which was fair, I guess, except that it meant we all had to pretend he had never existed, and definitely didn’t exist now. I never got the hang of that until I was an adult – constantly tripping myself up in the middle of a sentence. “I went to the cartoon cinema with my da … some man. Wait, not a man: a woman. Some strange woman took me to the cartoon cinema. Yes, it was great, we saw Bugs Bunny, thanks for asking.” Protocol was a big thing, but it was unguessable. Things you would think were posh – the Queen’s speech – were not posh, and my aunt had to sneak off and watch it on her own. Things you would think were not posh – putting on your cracker party hat and not taking it off, not ever, not until you got home – were mandatory. Once, he asked me if I wanted lemonade and I said: “No, thank you – it might make me fart,” and I thought this was the most courteous and intelligent answer ever, since a classy person would definitely think ahead, but then I saw my mother’s face, and it turned out that is not what a classy person would have done.

Anyway, at some point in the late 80s, the tables were turned and everyone was coming to us. My sister and I were in our teens. We were maybe 10% more competent than your average teenage cook, but it would be a stretch to think we could manage the turkey, and I can’t remember whose idea that was. Probably mine. (I think my uncle came to our childhood home to eat 10 times in my whole life – and once to my first flat, when I made potted ham, and it was unbelievably disgusting, claggy and mealy, as if it had been chewed and then refrigerated. I offered him some bread, and he said: “Yes, that might help,” which was, again, fair.)

Having guests always seemed to involve eating in a room we didn’t normally eat in, so we would spend the day moving a bed out of it, and a lifetime’s stash of the stuff that collects behind stuff. Then we would move a table in and cover it with a sheet because we weren’t oversupplied with tablecloths. And then we’d stand back and stare at it for hours: does that look like a dining table? Or a really uncomfortable bed? Is any of this in any way posh?

So that was the drill this Christmas, and all this time the turkey was in the oven, sort of cooking. It definitely didn’t go in early enough, but the main problem was that the door wouldn’t close. For some reason, I thought this would be fine. That’s the most common argument I have now with my kids; me going: “It’ll be fine,” and them going: “NO, IT WILL NOT NECESSARILY BE FINE.”

The atmosphere was like a montage scene of the Tudor servants of a remote lord getting ready for the king to arrive, except those people would have known what they were doing with suet, and we were just acting nervous and a bit hysterical. And it was all absolutely fine. We had enough chairs, we had enough drinks. We’d got all the right stuff – we had smoked salmon, a stilton in a truckle, and nobody had gone off-piste and innovated. It was a bit stiff, but it was nothing like as boring as it normally was. There really wasn’t a hitch, except when we got the turkey out, and it wasn’t cooked at all.

You have to understand how incredibly regimented Christmas Day was: the salmon was always at the same time, there was always a walk afterwards, the lunch was always after the walk, the presents were always after that. Any spontaneous change to the order of events would have been more than an act of aggression; it just wouldn’t have computed. It couldn’t have happened because it had never happened. There was no way the turkey could have just spent longer in the oven, never mind the three more hours it needed in a much bigger oven.

It was like an anxiety dream where you have murdered someone, but forgotten to bury them: I was trying to carve it at the table, without anybody noticing the blood. I went round the bird’s extremities, finding modest portions of the least dangerous meat, and distributed them in order of my favourites, although also on a family-hold-back principle, so I think my cousin’s wife did OK and my sister got potato. The stuffing I took out and fried, while pretending to make gravy that I think my mother had already made. Luckily, the dining room was nowhere near the kitchen because it was actually a bedroom.

My uncle was absolutely fine. It’s possible his eyesight wasn’t great. He was much more benign off his own turf, and did a lot of nodding and smiling. Who knows, he might have had a thing or two to say when he got home. Plainly, nobody died, otherwise I would have adopted a different tone to describe all this.

Formality has so much power: the most formal person sets the rules and everyone tries like crazy to meet and anticipate them, like sheep trying to avoid a fence that isn’t really electrified. A lot of its heft is in the things it leaves unsaid, which become immune to verbal challenge. Then you get the point where the potential downside is that you kill someone you are related to, and you sail straight past that point, to maintain the fiction that you can do formal as well as the next man. Reflecting on the event afterwards, I thought: in future, I’m not going to do those kind of manners any more. I’m going to do a rigorous separation between the stuff that hurts people’s feelings, and the stuff that dresses up as courtesy but is actually a set of class-based mechanisms of domination and control. I also learned that it’s harder to give people salmonella than you may think.