It was chilly for Poldore, but there was no sign of snow, there rarely was. Christmas usually came and went in Poldore without a single flake, the temperatures reasonably mild for the time of year, the occasional downpour of rain the only threat, one that had shown its true destructive force in the summer’s great June floods. Thankfully though, the rest of the year had been comparatively kind, giving the badly battered town time to slowly get back on its feet.

One to know when she was beaten, Sue left the pub, and walked to the harbour front to try to work out what to do next, and she had to admit, the thought gave her a leaden feeling deep in the pit of her stomach. Any other year being charged with the mission to save Christmas would have been right up her alley, but this year … Well, this year she really just wanted to go to bed with a good bottle of wine and watch The Sound of Music on repeat. Still, needs must, and the Montaignes hadn’t lasted in this town for more than eight hundred years by giving up at the first sight of trouble. Sue sat down on her favourite bench, the one that she had had put there in memory of her father, and looked out at the flat grey sea, enjoying the relative quiet of the town, that brief lull before the Christmas tourists descended.

At least now the tiny harbour town looked a little more like itself. The floods and storms of the summer had battered it into near submission and ruined the season for so many shops and businesses. Sue was sad to say that she had seen more than one of them give up and go. For months after the June floods, the ‘Great Storm’ as everyone was already calling it, the town had looked beleaguered and broken. Sue had fully realised then how much she felt like she was the town. There had been the wonderful high of Ruan and Alex’s wedding – Ruan being Poldore’s broodingly handsome tour boat operator and Alex, the town’s first female harbour master and tomboy. Then, only a few weeks later, the most unlikely couple of all, Ruan’s fashion designer sister Tamsyn and Jed the vicar, had married, less than two months after their first meeting. The marriage should have gone wrong, already. It should have been a disaster waiting to happen, but somehow it wasn’t. There had never been a better non-believing, dress-designing vicar’s wife than Tamsyn Edwards née Thorne, and Reverend Jed Edwards had gone from strength to strength with her at his side.