Christmas

Wednesday

Bruce Anderson

Either fish or fowl

It is enough to drive a fellow to the bottle. I am not given to agnosticism. My view is that if the evidence seems to sustain a conclusion, weigh it and arrive at one. On Brexit, I find that impossible. Most of my friends have no problem. From Remoaners to rejoicers, they all deal in certainties. I cannot emulate them. My intellect seems to have turned into a cushion, bearing the imprint of the last person I spoke to. I refuse to believe that the Bank of England has turned into the equivalent of an M.R. James ghost story, a delightful way of giving everyone a good scare on a wintry evening. But friends of mine argue equally forcefully to the contrary. Roger Bootle, David Howell, Nigel Lawson, Peter Lilley, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Matt Ridley: these are serious men, making a cogent case.

Laura Freeman

Being snowed-in

It took three hours for cabin fever to set in. Last Christmas, snowed in at the Oxfordshire homestead, my brother Ed and I, cooped up, cross, snappish, reverted to childhood squabbling. There’s a photo on my phone of Ed’s dog Rags standing at the kitchen door looking mournfully through the glass. We did let her out, but there are few sights so pitiable as a Chihuahua--Pomeranian trying to gambol, shivering, through four inches of snow. The first afternoon, I paced the upstairs corridor wondering how long before I went full Jack Torrance in The Shining. ‘All snow and no walk makes Laura a dull girl…’ By the third day, I was over the hump and well into hygge. Sheepskin socks, cashmere bobble hat, collected works of Somerset Maugham.

Taki

High life | 13 December 2017

It’s that time of year again. Yippee! And get your wallets out. Scrooges are no longer tolerated at Christmas, although once upon a time people were so fed up with the annual Christmas shakedown that in 1419 London biggies ruled that Christmas solicitations were banned. Servants, apprentices, tradesmen and churchmen had all become professional supplicants, and were not best pleased by the ukase. But as someone once said, it is better to give than to receive, so there. We now give to doormen, barbers, hairdressers, garage attendants, lift operators, building supers, postmen and rich tiny children with hands outstretched. You name it, they expect it. And let us not forget professional beggars outside expensive stores. One of them once threw the dollar I had given him back in my face.

Melissa Kite

Real life | 13 December 2017

If only I knew whether I would have a kitchen, I could order a turkey. But despite having an almost finished kitchen space, half the kitchen units are still stacked up in the dining room and a weighty impasse has developed over the delivery options for the rest of it. Naturally, the shop can deliver the cooker, dishwasher and worktops right now, but there will only be one man in the van and another man will be needed at my house to help him carry the worktops. I can’t carry them, and I am not remotely insulted by the gender bias this implies. Stefano, meanwhile, is refusing to come back until all the units are on site. I told the kitchen manufacturer this and they said they could deliver the kitchen now but they will need another man.

Martin Gayford

Renaissance man

Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits — nervous, intense and enigmatic — are among the most memorable to be painted in 16th-century Italy, but his fellow Venetians didn’t see it that way. In a letter to Lotto of 1548, the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino wrote that he was ‘outclassed in the profession of painting’ by Titian. Now, though, with an exhibition of his portraits in store at the National Gallery next year, it looks as though Lotto’s time may finally have come. On a bright day this autumn my wife and I went on the trail of this most fascinating and idiosyncratic of Renaissance artists.

The Spectator

The Spectator’s Christmas appeal: donate internships, not money

Perhaps the most insightful piece of political analysis since the turn of the century came from the Queen in a speech to the United Nations a few years ago. She first addressed the UN in 1957 and returned in 2010 to reflect on what she had learned in the interim. She had seen prime ministers every week and dined with presidents from all over the world — but what struck her was how seldom their schemes translated into real progress. ‘Many sweeping advances have come about not because of governments, committee resolutions, or central directives,’ she pointed out, ‘but instead because millions of people around the world have wanted them.’ Politicians run the government, not the country.

Kate Chisholm

Foreign exchange

The season of Advent, for most children, means anticipation, gleeful waiting, the counting down of days. But after a certain age the build-up to Christmas changes its nature, becomes more like anxious preparation. It can, though, be thought of as a time of reflection. Radio 3’s Christmas Around Europe has for years nourished that feeling by taking us on a leisurely, day-long musical tour around the continent, usually on the last Sunday before Christmas. It’s a chance to step back from the frenetic fuss and wander in the mind, as the music plays, to other times and distant places, to take oneself beyond the present, or rather into another kind of present.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 6 December 2018

Decorating a tree on the unfinished minstrels’ gallery was an appealing idea if only for the health and safety violations. The little lodger was up for it and between the two of us we heaved the six-foot tree to the kitchen, preparing to hoist it aloft. As things stand, the gallery above the kitchen doesn’t have a railing. Or floorboards. A railing would only have made it more difficult to get the tree up there. But floorboards are probably a basic requirement when one is planning to stand a tree on a three-foot wide mezzanine, ten feet up in the air. So, as the little lodger watched in mute horror, I pulled out all the old reclaimed floorboards I had stacked in the cellar ready for the carpenter to fit and began pushing them up there.

Mary Wakefield

‘We’re all travelling together’

‘But what must it be like for the fish?’ We’re talking about cormorants, Neil MacGregor and I, and the spectacular way they dive for food, when he pauses to consider the situation from the perspective of a fish. ‘I mean just think, there you are swimming along with lots of chums and then suddenly there’s this great whoosh and the chum next to you has just disappeared! He’s vanished! And of course you can’t see the cause of it.’ MacGregor tilts his head. The sunlight in the offices of Penguin on the Strand seems to condense to a point in his eye. ‘Can you imagine it?’ he says. I can’t. It’s not easy to empathise with an anchovy, but MacGregor has a gift for inhabiting other points of view.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 January 2018

Gavin Stamp, who died just before the year’s end, will be mourned by many Spectator readers. For years, particularly in the 1980s, he was the paper’s main voice on architectural questions, notably as they affected the public space. His voice, both angry and compassionate, would be raised whenever he thought someone in authority — in church, state, local government, big business — was damaging what belonged to the people. He was very important at changing official attitudes imbued with fag-end modernism. No one expounded better the conception of a building’s public purpose, so to hear him talk about, say, Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, was revelatory.

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Evening service

It was a culinary triumph. My hosts do not spend much time in the UK, and are determined to entertain stylishly during their visits. This Christmas they succeeded, blending tradition and radicalism. The planning began in Pall Mall on the third lunching-day in advent. We addressed the major strategic question: satiation. After bird plus pud, there is barely the energy to fall asleep in front of an old film and the rest of the day can be unsatisfactory. In recent years, I have noticed a tendency to deal with this problem by de-fanging the pudding. There is a new girlie-man breed of Christmas puds which lack the embrandied pomp of previous generations. In my friends’ case, this was not an option.

Tuesday

Olivia Potts

Recipe: The Perfect Leftover Turkey Curry

Turkey curry, as a means of using up festive leftovers, has become something of a joke: the turkey curry buffet in Bridget Jones is the true low point of Bridge’s festive calendar. The prospect can strike fear into the most Christmas-spirited of souls. But actually, on Boxing Day, or the day after, the last thing you really want is the same meal you’ve been eating for the past two days, looking a little tired and fridge-worn, all the best bits gone. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll be first to the table for cold roast meats and my fifth serving of stilton in 48 hours, and if you hesitate for a moment, you won’t see that final portion of trifle for dust.

The Spectator

Barometer: How much do we throw away over the Christmas period?

Festive waste: How much do we throw away over the Christmas period? — 1 billion Christmas cards. — 83 sq km of wrapping paper (enough to plaster the whole of Brighton and Hove with festive greetings). — 125,000 tonnes plastic packaging. — Six million Christmas trees (as many as there are trees in Epping Forest and all London’s parks put together). — 4200 tonnes of aluminium foil, enough to manufacture 14 Boeing 747s.

Sunday

Rod Liddle

The real meaning of Christmas

Each Boxing Day my mother would take out her pen and pad, And estimate the cost price of those Christmas gifts we'd had, From relatives and family friends. And when the sum fell short, Of the monetary value for the various gifts she'd bought, She'd write it in her ledger. Underlined in red. So, Aunty Bertha, Mrs Bridges – to my mum, they were now dead. 'A pair of socks for twenty pence! A slinky half as dear! I'll tell you this for nothing, son – they're getting nowt next year. I bought that cow some Matchmakers, not just mint, but orange too And all I have is ankle socks – I hope she gets the flu.

Jane Kelly

Feeling lonely at Christmas? Me too

In Dumas’ great novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès was condemned to life imprisonment in the notorious Chateau d’If, a lonely tower off the French coast, plus an annual flogging. The human mind being what it is he couldn’t sit peacefully enjoying his sea view. Instead his anxious thoughts continually anticipated the pain to come. It isn't clear in which month he was whipped but it seems likely that he was probably worrying about it for at least three months in advance. I know how he feels: in much the same way, I am among those who start losing sleep about Christmas Day in mid-October. No one could have loved Christmas more than I once did.

Ben Schott

My Christmas party game comes with a Brexit veto

Since it’s That Time Of Year, I have a quick parlour game suggestion: ‘Copy & Paste’. At any time during a meal, or long weekend, when someone does or says something of note, another can point to them and say ‘Copy’. Then, whenever anyone points to that person and says ‘Paste’, they have to repeat their performance, or pay a forfeit. If the holiday becomes especially Brexit-y, you can prohibit the repetition of an offending act by introducing the function ‘Cut’.

Saturday

Steerpike

A very Guardian Christmas: decorate a tree branch

Christmas – the season of goodwill, turkey, tinsel and general over-indulgence. Except that is, if you work at the Guardian. With just two days to go until Christmas day, the paper has produced a late contender for most Grauniad article of the year. Writing for the paper, Saskia Sarginson shares her Christmas dilemma: can one permit traditional indulgences when 'they seem at odds with the world we live in today'? Sarginson's environmentally-conscious children have changed her perspective on Christmas traditions: 'My children have no desire to hark back to something that is gone, and I see their point that traditional indulgences seem at odds with the world we live in today.

Charles Moore

My childhood horror of a warm Christmas

As a child, I had a horror of the idea of Christmas in a hot place. Somebody told me that in Australia they ate roast turkey on the beach. This sounded positively irreligious, and I gave no consideration to the fact that the chief subject of the Christmas story probably never enjoyed a white Christmas himself (though it can be surprisingly cold in the Judaean hills at this time of year). Actually, I never experienced a white Christmas either, on the day itself, though I do remember the evening of Boxing Day 1962 when it began to snow, and didn’t melt till March. The other day, I re-read The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White. I loved the book when I was eight, but had almost forgotten it.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Christmas splurge: How much extra do households spend at Christmas?

Christmas splurge How much extra do households spend at Christmas? — £500, according to the Bank of England. Over the course of December our spending on food increases by 10%, alcoholic drinks by 20% and books 35%. — £645, according to OnePoll (2016), including £117 spent on a partner’s gift. — £796, according to YouGov (2015), including £159 on food and drink and £596 on gifts.

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

The Queen should force her unmarried relatives to corridor creep this Christmas

Thank God for the proprieties. This magazine's editor, Fraser Nelson, rattled a few score Anglicans today when he declared in his Radio 4 newspaper roundup at Broadcasting House (pleasingly paired with the FT’s Lionel Barber, BTW) that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry were to share a bedroom when they stay with the Queen at Sandringham over Christmas. This was on the back of a piece by Rachel Johnson, sister of, in the Mail on Sunday, deploring the fact that Meghan was to glad hand the crowds after the Christmas service, even though she’s only engaged. It was the bedroom-sharing arrangement bit that scandalised me.