Nestling among the silver and turquoise baubles on my Christmas tree this year is a battered little hand-knitted kangaroo.
No bigger than my thumb, it has a sliver of tinsel around its neck, from which hangs a tiny gold boomerang.
My Mum gave that to me more than 30 years ago when I first left Australia for England. ‘This is to remind you to always come back to us, Mandy; boomerangs always come back,’ she said to me then.
Of course, by ‘us’ she meant her and Dad. And go back I did, almost every Christmas, while they came here to London to spend summers with me. For three decades, we Platells boomeranged across the world.
Journalist Amanda Platell with her father Frank Platell and mother Norma in 2010
Not this year though. For the first time, I was not packing an extra suitcase full of presents, nor fretting about where I’d hidden my passport.
I didn’t hear my Dad’s cry when I arrived bleary-eyed from a 20-hour flight: ‘Oh Mandy, you’re home, lovely.’ Or watch Mum fussing over the sausage rolls in the oven because she knew they were my favourite.
Dad wasn’t the genial host dispensing the drinks for family and visiting friends while Mum sweated in the draining Aussie heat over a traditional Christmas lunch.
To be accurate, it wasn’t the case last year either. Mum and Dad spent Christmas 2018 together in a nursing home as they neared the very end of their long lives.
Regular readers of my column will know that my mother Norma and father Frank died, aged 90 and 92, two weeks after Christmas on January 7, 2019.
Their deaths were, in one extraordinary way, blessed and miraculous. Because they were simultaneous. As I wrote soon afterwards, the nurse tending them in the room they shared — beds pushed together so they could hold hands — noticed Mum’s breathing pattern was different and Dad was unusually restless.
It was just before midnight. Ten minutes later she returned to check on them and found that both had passed away — lying beside each other as they had done for 70 years. The doctor could not work out which of them had died first.
On that gloriously sunny Australia morning when I saw their coffins lying side by side at the funeral — Dad’s so much bigger than Mum’s — my heart was bursting with grief.
And I wept again as I took that battered little Roo out of his tissue paper and placed him on my tree this year.
Nestling among the silver and turquoise baubles on my Christmas tree this year is a battered little hand-knitted kangaroo
Nothing could have prepared me for losing both parents together, and a year on, it’s the simplest of things that make my eyes fill.
A magpie on the feeder in my garden reminds me of how Dad used to hand-feed a family of maggies each evening with scraps of bacon rind.
Having been hungry as a child growing up in the Australian bush, he couldn’t bear for any creature to go to bed on an empty belly.
Then there are the bee-motif wine glasses we brought back from our first holiday in France that I still use. They remind me of Dad’s toast of ‘bee’s bum’ — he said that I always filled them up to the level of the bee’s bottom!
Or laying the table for a special dinner with Mum’s prized Royal Doulton dinner service, which she left me. We’d chosen it together all those years ago and that memory still makes me smile.
The sight of an elderly couple walking shakily down the street, clasping each other’s age-spotted hands will also stop me in my tracks.
And there was a moment this summer when I spotted a father going fishing with his children — just as me and my brothers, Michael and Cameron, went fishing with Dad when we were little.
Yet though I miss them, there is a sense that they are always around me still. When rushing for church and grabbing one of Mum’s scarves, I can still smell her favourite scent on it, Penhaligon’s Elisabethan Rose.
Chopping tomatoes and onions takes me back to her famous ratatouille — ‘Normatouille’, Dad called it — which she made to go with our barbecued steaks.
And then afterwards, Dad would say: ‘Mandy, you couldn’t eat better in a restaurant.’
I remember how Mum was with me once on the Sunday before Christmas preparing lunch for my stepson Max and our extended London family — a lunch that stretched through till 8pm. I think I did her proud, although the sprouts were slightly overcooked.
So many memories, all of them happy — but deep sadness, too.
How do you hold tight to their spirit and their laughter when the last image embedded in your mind is of their two coffins sliding away from you for ever? I’ve discovered you can’t recapture the past or recreate those happy days.
I tried to do exactly that in August, going on holiday with friends to Draguignan in southern France, where my parents and I had spent so many summers.
We’d celebrate their birthdays — Mum’s on June 15, Dad’s on June 25 — in an old farmhouse set among the whispering pines. Dad dubbed it Platells’ Paradise.
But this year it had all changed. The friendly old café, where we practised our French (badly) on tolerant locals, was now part of an amorphous High Street chain.
The woman who ran the bar and looked like Ava Gardner had retired. Gone, too, was the rotisserie man who had forced fat-soaked potatoes on us with our lunchtime rosé.
He used to call me and Mum ‘les dames aux chapeaux’ — Mum had drilled into me from an early age that ladies always wore hats in the noonday sun to protect their complexions. And yet a strange thing happened on that trip.
I was wearing Mum’s wedding ring on a chain around my neck. The chain broke somewhere between London and Draguignan and that tiny gold band was gone. I was bereft — only for my friend to find it on the floor of the hire car.
Slipping it onto my finger for safekeeping, I felt Mum was smiling beside me, wearing the big blue hat I’d bought her that she saved for Draguignan.
Indeed, I have felt my parents with me so often that I thought I was becoming delusional.
But we shared a strong faith which has helped, and the thought that I’ll meet them again someday and that they are always watching over me has intensified.
I swear that each Sunday since I lost them, however gloomy the weather, there is a sunbeam that shines on me through the window as I sit in the pew near the back of my church.
I feel its warmth, I feel them with me and I can hear Dad singing, as he did under the gum trees in the backyard after Sunday School when I was a child: ‘Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam.’
Although this Christmas Day service was tough, wedged between my two dear friends Andrew and Gary, I could not belt out Dad’s favourite words in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing as we had so often done together since I was a child in Perth.
I choked over the words:
Mild he lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die,
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.
Recovering my composure and the (inherited) terrible Platell voice for O Come, All Ye Faithful, however, gave me hope. I imagined Mum and Dad alongside my late brother Michael, singing in the choir of angels.
Ahead of the first anniversary of my parents’ death, I’m filled in equal measure with dread and a sense of peace. We had a good and long life together. Like so many families, it was extraordinary only in its ordinariness.
Every day I think: ‘What would Mum or Dad do?’ They were better, more selfless than me, and I feel that even now they’re making me try to be the best daughter I can be. Kinder, more thoughtful, more generous — more full of joy and laughter.
So when I take that battered little Roo and his boomerang down from the Christmas tree on Twelfth Night — January 6 — to pack away for another year, I’ll have one New Year resolution for sure. To smile and treasure the memories, rather than weep.