More from life

I feel a bit sorry for Piers Morgan. On Tuesday, Ewan McGregor was due to appear on the sofa with Piers on ITV’s Good Morning to talk about the Trainspotting sequel, but he failed to turn up. Later, the actor explained on Twitter that it was due to the journalist’s remarks about the women’s marches that took place last weekend, in which he described some of the participants as ‘rabid feminists’ and suggested he should organise a men’s march in response. I had a similar experience about five years ago when the actor Matthew Macfadyen pulled out of an interview he was due to do with me.

I am very bad at remembering my dreams: I would have been a poor patient for Dr Freud. But I know that as a little boy most of my dreams were rather frightening, even if I can’t recall them in detail. An oft-repeated dream involved a monstrous apparition that would rush down from the sky into my bedroom and be about to attack me or gobble me up, when I would suddenly leap awake, much relieved that nothing unpleasant had happened. I can’t describe what the monster looked like, except that it was amorphous and not human. Occasionally the dressing-gown hanging from my door would suddenly transform itself into its hideous form and rush at me from across the bedroom. Then, too, I would wake up in time to save myself.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, likes making and keeping New Year resolutions. In recent years he has learnt Mandarin, read 25 books, run one mile every day, and created a robot-butler to organise his home. But this year his New Year resolution is more high-minded than usual. ‘My personal challenge for 2017,’ he writes, ‘is to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year.’ Why should he want to do a thing like that?

The past year has been tumultuous, full of upheaval and tragedy, but my chickens have been spared it all. Indeed, their year has been unusually pleasant and peaceful. After years in which they have been regularly subjected to murderous assaults by foxes and dogs, they were finally fenced into a section of the garden that savage animals could not penetrate. In consequence, there has been a year of rare tranquillity in the chicken world. The worst that my little flock of six chickens has had to endure is the company of a guinea fowl, which I originally got because guinea fowl have a reputation for being good guard birds that make a great din whenever a predator is in the vicinity. But this particular guinea fowl is interested more in bossing chickens than in protecting them.

New Year’s Day is the most depressing of holidays. It doesn’t celebrate anyone or anything worth celebrating. It simply marks the passage from one year to the next, something so predictable and uninteresting that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Yet people see it as a great opportunity to start again, to turn over a new leaf, to make times better and happier than before. It’s an odd moment in which to be optimistic, when the winter is deepening and the debts incurred over Christmas are waiting to be paid. But nothing stops millions from greeting this non-event with wine and song and gaiety as the clock strikes midnight.

While American conservatives, including Donald Trump and the Cuban exiles in Florida, whooped with joy at the news of the death of Fidel Castro, and while millions of America-haters throughout the world extravagantly mourned his passing, Barack Obama was circumspect. ‘History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him,’ he said. This was a restrained comment by an American president about a foreign leader whose 47 years of dictatorship had been sustained almost entirely by stirring up hatred of the United States; and we won’t have to wait for history’s verdict on his impact on that particular country, for we know already how enormous it was. He not only humiliated JohnF.

Most people who die in Britain are now cremated — more than 70 per cent of them — but there is often uncertainty among the bereaved about what to do with the ashes. When dead bodies aren’t burnt, it is straightforward: they are buried in coffins. But the options for the ashes of the dead are various. They may be interred in a churchyard or a cemetery, they may be planted among the roots of a new tree, and they may be scattered in the countryside, in a river, or at sea. But these are just the conventional choices. Lots of exotic alternatives are also offered.