| All I Want is You Douglas Henshall and his girlfriend, a Croatian-born playwright, have been together for two-and-a-half years and live in north London. This is the second year they will be spending Christmas in Zagreb with her parents Douglas, 41 When I got together with Tena I hadn't had a family Christmas for an awfully long time. My family's quite spread out and my mum's dead, which just changed Christmas altogether, so going over to Zagreb last year was completely new. One of the sweetest things was discovering another family that I was part of. It was scary at first, but her parents are incredibly welcoming. Christmas Eve was interesting. Tena's mum had never seen any of my work so she asked if I could bring some tapes. We were sitting on the sofa and they put on Channel 4's Anna Karenina, where I played Lenin. In the first scene, he was exercising stark bollock naked, then Kitty turns down his marriage proposal, so at the end of the sequence he ends up getting quite a graphic blow job from a hooker. I was impaled on my chair by a dozen different neuroses, but then I thought: 'We're all grown-ups, for God's sake.' Eventually I bolted from the room, but everyone was fine about it. When I was a child growing up in Glasgow my parents did Christmas incredibly well. They were as excited about it as we were. Our whole extended family came to us: we had 23 for dinner, which is the number for chaos, apparently - so quite apt, but all the more fun for that. My uncle played the guitar and sang, an enormous man, like a walrus. In the evening the adults would stick on a Billy Connolly LP and we were sent to bed; you'd hear these gales of laughter, and I wondered who this man was that I wasn't allowed to listen to. After my marriage ended - a hundred years ago - I had a few memorable Christmases on my own: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But now I'm part of a family again. Tena's mum is just the sweetest woman. Before I ever met her, she spent 10 months learning English so we could talk, which is one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for me. And then when we were leaving Zagreb last Christmas, she said to me: 'You're ours now.' When you don't have a mum any more, having a woman of her age say that to me just touched me beyond belief. Tena, 30 Since I've brought Dougie back to Croatia, the family has grown a little bit. There's a dash of something special. My father is a TV writer, but he can only speak a few words in English - phrases such as 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Good Moaning' from Allo, Allo! - so last year there was a lot of back-slapping and 'Hey Dougie', 'Hey Ivo'. I think my family is very easy to get on with at Christmas. We're not religious, so it's more a time to have a little celebration dinner together. We're a very small family: my mum, my dad, my aunt and me. We have a tree and presents on Christmas Eve, but the only big deal is the cod fish - everyone has it in Croatia, and just before Christmas there's absolute hysteria about getting it, like turkey here. You buy it dry, then hammer it to make it soft. My aunt Nena makes the absolute best dish. In fact, when Dougie and I spent our first Christmas together, in London in 2005, just the two of us, we went round for days looking for the right ingredients to make the cod. Later, we invited a friend of Dougie's over, and it was only two years after that I discovered he's a vegetarian, but he actually ate my cod because I made such a big deal about it. When I'm back in Zagreb I realise that home is the place you're annoyed by when you're back and the place you miss when you're away. I think Dougie was a bit shocked by how I revert to being a teenager at Christmas - I never clear up the plates after a meal because there's always someone to do it for me. Liz Hoggard The Observer December 16th 2007 |
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