Window No. 3

When you're a small child and your eye line doesn't go much above your mum and dad's waists, most shop windows are just the right height to catch your attention.The contents (clothes, perfume, bread) don't matter. It's the colour and the sparkle that draw you in. I was brought up in York, a pretty English city that takes great pride in the way it looks. In the lead up to Christmas, the festive street lights would come out along with decorated trees on many of the shop entrances, and the window displays would turn into mini pantomimes.

My mother came from another Yorkshire city, Leeds. We would travel over there several times throughout the year to see family friends but the Christmas visit was always the best. Not only did I get to drop in on more than one familiar face (the Halls where Audrey would have bought the best of everything but forgotten to remove her washing from the overhead airers in the kitchen; my godmother Kath with her collection of tiny Disney figures on the mantelpiece; and the elderly Brinkmans who always filled my mother with sherry and left me in wonderment at their glass ornaments which they displayed on a shelf high up on the walls, far too high for me to reach thankfully), but the trip back through the night-time city centre would be a magical sight for my young eyes with so many lights and animated shop displays to see. I would eventually fall asleep in the back of the car and wake up next morning in my bed.

There is a part of me that still turns into a child when I see the Christmas shop fronts. It gives the term 'window shopping' a wonderful, new meaning.