I really over-booked myself this Christmas: I took on loads of shifts on top of rehearsing the January play, and still tried to see friends as often as possible. Don't get me wrong, a lot of it was worth it, but I didn't get much of a chance to really slow down and enjoy much of it.

The one chance I did get for a bit of me-time came when I was washing the dishes a few days before Christmas, when I decided to put on White Christmas, one of my favourite holiday movies.

So much of what I love about this film - and so many others - is everything that goes along with it. The Ephemera. There's a word used in arts restoration for things like this and for the life of me I can't remember it and it's driving me insane.... begins with a P I think... PROVENANCE.

Anyway, the things that I think about when I think about White Christmas are the conversations I have with my Mum every time I get to watch it with her. Quite often we re-tread similar territory, but theres a lot of very old memories wrapped up in them. Every year we talk about how incredible Rosemary Clooney's dresses are, how Vera Ellen was probably the best dancer in the world, how underrated Danny Kaye was, how you'd never get a child going en-point like that anymore (thankfully).

My favourite song in the entire film is "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me". It's a weirdly haunting song for a film like this, and Christmas is an under-rated spooky season for sure. Plus, even though I'm not much of a musical theatre person, maybe naively, it's the one song I think I could sing reasonably well. But, wrapped up in my love of that song, is my Mum sat there pointing out an early movie appearance of George Chikaris, star of one of her favourite films, West Side Story.

I think about her a lot when I watch that film. I think about me and her sat watching it after the decorations go up, often just the two of us since Dad is still at work. Big silly grins on our faces the entire time.

I'm glad I got to see them this year. We couldn't make it up north for the holidays, and my partner and I were preparing to spend it on our own when they got in touch to say they'd booked an AirBNB for the week. I don't get to see them nearly as often as I'd like but we make every effort we can to take advantage when an opportunity arises.

I have a similar thing with my Dad, though for a very different film.

When I was a kid and my Dad put me to bed, I had this tactic for getting him to stay with me longer: I would ask him about his favourite movies, films that I was a long way off being old enough to see. I remember vividly him telling me about all the Jaws movies, being totally confused when he tried to explain the plots of the (at the time) two Terminator films, and about the one film that gave him nightmares, Alien!

But there was one film that he alluded to but never outright told me about, Trainspotting.

"I'm not going to tell you what it's about, but we'll watch it when you're old enough. I think you'll like it."

On or near my eighteenth birthday, Dad and I sat down and put Trainspotting on, and suddenly the soundtrack CD he'd been playing in his car since I was a kid exploded into life.

Trainspotting has a lot of cultural cache for Scottish people, regardless of age. I was born in the nineties, I wasn't a part of that culture, the rave scene well and truly passed me by, and I was too young to really notice what heroin was doing to people back then, but that didn't seem to matter. These guys spoke like me, ran down streets I knew, had that same sense of humour as the folk I grew up with. Hell, my Dad even had the Begbie 'tache when I was younger.

This wasn't a film that showed my life laid bare on the screen like it was for so many people, but it was the film I shared with my Dad; the film my Dad waited eighteen years to share with me.

A few years later, when I was about to leave home for drama school, the sequel came out. We had both been through quite a lot by then: I had started my career and pretty quickly got picked up to do some fairly big TV work, as well as theatre jobs that took me away for several months at a time; there were health scares, job changes, Brexit, break-ups; things just seemed different. We were in a period of change.

Seeing that film felt very different to the first. Trainspotting feels like the possibilities of being young, showing you what's out there. T2 is about that change, getting older, growing up, finding yourself again further down the road. I think about a lot when I see those films: my country, my culture and the culture that shaped me, the path I'm on, and the people I've crossed paths with along the way. I think about my Dad. I think about becoming a man, and the kind of man I want to be.

Those films both make me sob like I'm a kid again.