Features

Monday

Sarah Vine

Why an air fryer is the ideal Christmas gift

Christmas has an annoying tendency to kick off far too early these days, but I can never give into it until after my son’s birthday on 23 November. This year he turned 18, which feels like a milestone for both of us. He can now legally be served in a pub and go to prison, and I theoretically have a man about the house again. Even though, unfortunately, he seems to have taken after his father in his complete inability to perform any of the traditional male roles, such as assembling flat-packed furniture or not setting fire to the toaster. Still, I feel a sense of achievement at having managed to keep a whole human alive into adulthood. My other adult human is at university in Manchester.

Quentin Letts

How to fail upwards

Steam, which is largely insubstantial, rises. The same goes for soap suds, methane bubbles and numerous politicians. We naively consider 21st-century Britain a meritocracy, yet serial failures still float to the top of our public life. It has been a good year for these latter-day Widmerpools. Two changes of prime minister provided rich openings. One failer-upper made it all the way to 10 Downing Street; another leads HM Opposition. They are not just in parliamentary politics. In the civil service, journalism, art, football, business, the church and elsewhere, duffers drift upwards, grinning inanely while the rest of us gasp: ‘How did that happen?’ Resistance is pointless. We should embrace these lemons as part of the serendipity of life. Failer-uppers give hope to us all.

Andrey Kurkov

The puzzle of the twice-born Jesus

Lazarivka Snow has covered the fields and forests of much of Ukraine. When the sun reigns in the sky, its rays gild the scene. All my previous winters, all previous Christmas celebrations, were peaceful, and the snow, if it came, emphasised this calmness. Snow and cold preserve the life of the grass until spring, until the first warm weather. The snow seems to require everyone to rest, to avoid unnecessary movement, unnecessary noise. The acoustic properties of snow make joyful children’s voices louder – or is that just an aural illusion? No, snow definitely changes the sound of nature. It keeps the sounds above the ground as if He does not want them to disturb the hibernating moles and other inhabitants of the rich Ukrainian soil.

Barry Humphries

Why does no one dress for dinner at Claridge’s any more?

F. Scott Fitzgerald declared in an excellent late story that ‘the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things’. It is certainly what I am striving to do. I have far too much stuff so I’ve decided a little culling is needed. Some weeding out imperative, deaccessions inevitable. I’ve startedwith books; I’ll end up with people and finish with me. I kneel on the floor of my book room with a large cardboard box at my side. Do I really need all those George Meredith novels? Edgar Saltus is harder, but will I miss those duplicates of Purple and Fine Women and The Pace That Kills with the variant dust-wrapper and the misprint on page 43?

Adam Frank

The James Webb Space telescope is changing our understanding of the universe

When Nasa launched the James Webb Space telescope on Christmas Day last year its goal was to shed light on the wonders of the universe. It’s delivering on that promise: since the summer we’ve had a steady stream of stunning images of dying stars, distant planets and colliding galaxies. Researchers expected the telescope’s data would support the Big Bang theory. But it has captured images so far back in time, revealing the existence of galaxies so old, that the very origins of the universe have instead been called into question. ‘I find myself lying awake at three in the morning wondering if everything I’ve ever done is wrong,’ said Allison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas, after seeing the first images from the James Webb telescope.

David Mitchell

U-turn if you want to: a short story by David Mitchell

Twiddling my thumbs at the Rotterdam depot. Waiting on 72 pallets of Chinese tumble dryer. Five games of online chess, four YouTubes of sweary parrots, three Gordon Ramsay Kitchen Nightmares, two Idiots In Cars and a partridge in a pear tree later, it’s 12 noon. Another Pot Noodle for lunch. Spicy seafood, the label alleges. Tastes like my boxers on Day 5 of my European Tour. Paris-Frankfurt-Warsaw-Gdansk-Rotterdam loop. Got some cubes of mango for dessert. Yard manager Gus blames a chronic shortage of forklift drivers. Only three out of ten showed up today. They get better offers elsewhere, Gus says, so off they bugger. Must tell Emily. ‘See, O Daughter of Mine? It’s not just Great Britain!’ My daughter’s gone all lefty now she’s a nurse. Reads the Guardian, God help us.

Friday

Jacqueline Wilson

It’s hard to beat Christmas in the countryside

Christmas in the countryside – what could be better? All right, at the time of writing we’ve had such storms that the swans are swimming across the flooded fields and we squelch through thick mud when we take the dogs out, but we hope the sun will come out tomorrow. I don’t just write about little orphan Annies – I’m starting to sound like one, too. But rain or shine, Christmas will be lovely, with a Christmas tree in the village square, shops serving free mulled wine and mince pies, a barber-shop choir singing in the real barber’s shop, and the nursery school children reverently laying Baby Jesus in his crib at Christingle. One splendid year a child memorably dressed as a camel kidnapped Baby Jesus and galloped down the aisle with him.

Hannah Moore

The mystery of Jesus’s siblings

Since I gave birth four years ago and then, too soon afterwards, two years later, I have deliberately become a sponge for other women’s experiences of childbirth and raising babies. I found the whole process almost unbearably difficult, and I was baffled that other women didn’t seem to be walking around sharing their birth stories with strangers in the way I was. Matthew and Luke needed to set Jesus apart from his immediate family to emphasise the virgin birth During Christmas 2020, amid the fog of sleep deprivation, lockdown blues and postnatal depression, I began imagining Mary giving birth in a stable with only Joseph for a midwife.

Patrick Kidd

The trials and tribulations of a churchwarden

Missing: one king, answers to Balthazar. Wandered off last Epiphany with a French peasant girl who had a basket under each arm and an eye for wise men bearing gold and smellies. Could have returned to Babylon, more likely made for Lewisham. We will miss him at our church crib this year. While paintings of Jesus’s birth have been found in early Christian catacombs, the first live Nativity scene is said to have been created 800 years ago next Christmas by St Francis of Assisi as a visual aid for preaching. The idea spread, with statues replacing the living oxen, asses and shepherds. During the French Revolution, when churches were closed, one Jean-Louis Lagnel, an artist from Marseille, made clay figures of the Holy Family and supporting cast so that people could create Nativities at home.

Martin Rees

Space won’t offer an escape from Earth’s problems

Because I have the title Astronomer Royal, I’m often asked: ‘Did you do horoscopes for the Queen?’ Sadly, the answer’s ‘no’. I’m just an astronomer, not an astrologer. Scientists are poor forecasters – almost as poor as economists. But I fear I’ve become typecast as a doomster because I predict a bumpy ride through the next few decades.  We’re deep in the ‘anthropocene’. Humans are so numerous and so demanding of energy and resources that our collective footprint is changing the world’s climate, and despoiling the natural environment.

The Spectator

A Spectator Christmas poll: What gives you hope?

Volodymyr Zelensky   Volodymyr Zelensky makes a surprise visit to the liberated city Kherson, 14 November 2022 (Getty Images) I am inspired by the Ukrainian people – a courageous, creative and strong people who united in one moment against the brutal and unjust Russian aggression. All Ukrainians today are warriors – those on the front line, volunteers, journalists, IT specialists, doctors, teachers, absolutely everyone. These are strong and courageous people who are fighting for their homeland, their country and their lives. And nothing can break them. Not bombs, not rocket strikes, not the lack of electricity, water and heat in their homes, nor other types of Russian terror. This nation delights and inspires me and gives me confidence in the victory of Ukraine.

Sam Leith

‘Loss is a thing that we become’: Nick Cave on grief, faith and why he’s a conservative

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a distance. You can draw them in one line… They’ve got to be godlike. It’s all an invention. But it happened early on for me.’ On the handful of occasions over the years that I’ve seen Cave from a distance, he has been just that sort of figure – one a deft cartoonist would draw with one line: ski-jump nose, Sesame Street eyebrows and a swept-back bob of jet-black hair like Wednesday Addams after Uncle Fester chopped off her pigtails for a prank.

Andrew Watts

There’s nothing romantic about mistletoe

The line of trees beside the road into Tenbury Wells are bare of leaves at the beginning of December. But on their spindly branches are huge clumps of mistletoe, weighing them down like muffs on the skinny arms of dowagers. Most of the country’s mistletoe grows in a small area of England – Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, the counties around the Malvern Hills – but no one is quite sure why; it may be the number of orchards (mistletoe grows well on apple trees) or the climate of cold winters and warm summers.

Rory Sutherland and Slavoj Žižek

‘Universities shouldn’t be safe spaces’: Rory Sutherland and Slavoj Žižek on cancel culture, futurism and Hollywood Marxism 

Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural theorist. Rory Sutherland is The Spectator’s Wiki Man. We arranged for them to have a chat. They spoke for more than four hours about identity politics, Elon Musk, Hollywood, free speech and more. Introductions & ‘luxury beliefs’ Rory Sutherland: I’m recording this on a Meta Portal moving camera, which no one seems to have bought, because I assume nobody wants Mark Zuckerberg spying on them in their living room. I don’t mind though: no one wants to spy on an overweight 57-year-old advertising executive. Slavoj Žižek: I know what you mean. Perhaps we should do this interview naked from the waist down! By the way, Rory, I like that your bookshelves are completely empty.

Juliet Nicolson

My memories of Raymond Briggs

I really loved Raymond Briggs. I first met him in 1976, before his mega-fame had arrived. I was working in the publicity department of Raymond’s publishers, Hamish Hamilton, and every so often he would trundle a wheelie suitcase into the office containing the painted boards of artwork for his latest cartoon story. His visits were a joy because he was so funny, but also tricky because unlike every other author under our promotional care, Raymond considered the less media attention he received to be the better. He referred to us as ‘blooming publicity women’ and we had to beg him to agree to talk to eager interviewers, and to submit to the scrutiny of TV and radio chat shows. The broadcaster Chris Evans, for example, was dismissed as ‘that ginger-haired git’.

Wednesday

Jenny McCartney

Don’t expect a united Ireland any time soon

A hundred years since the founding of the Irish state – on 6 December 1922 – how likely or desirable is the prospect of Irish unity? The recent electoral success of Sinn Fein suggested to many – particularly in the US – that the idea’s momentum is now unstoppable. Of course it’s being egged on by Sinn Fein itself, whose New York Times advertisements in March proclaimed that Irish unity would be in the best interests of ‘citizens abroad and the wider diaspora’. Extensive polling for the Irish Times this week, however, paints a much more complex, contradictory picture of opinion at home. Before stocking up on celebratory green beer, the Irish-American diaspora might well be advised to read it.

Freddy Gray

The Windsors are warring over their womenfolk

Wouldn’t it be amusing to see an actual fly-on-the-wall job about Netflix’s new Harry & Meghan documentary? Imagine the scenes behind-the-scenes. The Duchess rehearses her crying face in consultation with her make-up specialist. The Duke glares at himself in a mirror. ‘I had to protect my family,’ he repeats over and over as he fingers his apricot beard. The lighting team try to coax along the impossibly capricious royals only to suffer their own nervous breakdowns after Meghan accuses them of disregarding her mental health. Or maybe that’s not the entertainment people want. Television these days is all about ‘structured reality’ – or rubbish glossed up as revelation. It’s up to you, the viewer, to decide how much you can be bothered to disbelieve.

Tina Brown

The Sussexes’ ‘extinction burst’ is coming

From the point of view of New York City, where I live, everything is going Meghan and Harry’s way. News items about their folly vs the worthy Waleses are a standard trope of the US home page of the Daily Mail, but they are the wrong side of America’s zeitgeist. True, no one could have expected a weaponised lady-in-waiting to sink the strenuous efforts to update the House of Windsor brand, but it is also true that to anyone with a modicum of PR smarts, the where-are-you-really-from flap involving Lady Susan Hussey – a Cretaceous-era courtier often glimpsed beneath a flower-pot hat riding beside the late Queen in the car to church – was a debacle waiting to happen.

Isabel Oakeshott

The truth about Matt Hancock

Matt Hancock and I have almost nothing in common. For starters I’m terrified of spiders and hopelessly squeamish. I physically retched as I watched him eating unmentionables in the Australian jungle. Far more importantly, we fundamentally disagree over his handling of the pandemic. The passage of time has not left me any less angry about lockdowns. My blood still boils when I think of the unnecessary suffering: the broken homes and broken businesses; the lost last moments with loved ones; the missed cancers and operations; a generation of children scarred forever.