Melanie McDonagh

My own relationship with the gambling industry is almost entirely framed by horse-racing. If I’m at a race, I’ll put a couple of quid each way on a horse I like the look of with a bookie. If I’m absent from the event, I’ll go for an Irish trainer and a name I like. My family had a weakness for betting on races; my grandmother spent happy hours studying form, and my grandfather had his own stool in the betting shop. As an activity, this does have the possibility you can lose your shirt – and lots of people did and do. But it’s a world – a whole world – away from contemporary joyless gambling on fixed-odds betting terminals, where the scope for human skill and insight is precisely zero. You can never, ever, beat the system.

Dirt, is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it, 'matter out of place'. For her, 'there is no such thing as absolute dirt' and 'no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit'. It is a label for 'all events which blur, smudge, contradict or otherwise confuse accepted classifications'.   This is a long way of getting round to saying that the Royal Horticultural Society is now encouraging us to embrace weeds. Four of the dozen show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show are to include them. Indeed Sheila Das, the garden manager at RHS Wisley, is anxious that we should eschew the derogatory term 'weeds'; she prefers 'weed heroes' or 'superweeds'. 'We used to call them plants in the wrong place', she said. 'They are not.

It would take longer than I’ve got to comb through copies of Thank you, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, to find out the ways in which they’ve been edited, 'minimally', to remove offensive language, but I think we can work out which bits may have fallen foul of the thought police. Penguin Random House have informed readers of the latest edition: 'Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.'  I can only say that, reading Young Men in Spats and a few other PGW stories lately, I found myself hoping that it wouldn’t occur to anyone to submit it to sensitivity readers.

The insanely irritating advertisements for BBC Sounds – 30 seconds to make the spirits sink – have recently included one exhorting us to watch the new BBC adaptation of Great Expectations – by the man who brought us Peaky Blinders! It’s a real achievement to lose every vestige of humour in Great Expectations Poor Dickens can’t pull in the punters on his own; it seems it takes Stephen Knight to draw a contemporary audience. Yep, the Stephen Knight who brought us A Christmas Carol, which should have made the Corporation think twice before letting him near Great Expectations, the first episode of which aired last night.

Those who back assisted dying/euthanasia/assisted suicide – and no doubt Prue Leith on her nationwide tour will be returning to her differences on this one with her MP son, Danny Kruger – have rarely suggested that it might usefully serve as a backdoor return to capital punishment. This, however, seems now to be the case in Belgium. Genevieve Lhermitte who murdered her five children – a son and four daughters – in 2007 has been killed by doctors at her own request. It was the conclusion to the tragedy that she originally intended. She had tried to take her own life after the murders, unsuccessfully, and was first convicted for life imprisonment in 2008 and later consigned to a psychiatric hospital in 2019.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is all very well, but nowadays the melancholy business of disposing of human remains can be expedited with caustic soda. I only know this because the Church of England’s General Synod has been asked to consider the burial alternative of water cremation, or resomation, which uses a bath of hot water and potassium or sodium hydroxide to dissolve flesh and bones. The family ends up with the ashes from the bones, and the biofluid from the process is disposed of in the sewers. This is legal in the UK, but so far water companies have been reluctant to embrace human remains.

Pope Benedict is dead; now only Pope Francis remains in the Vatican. And the Catholic Church is diminished by his passing, at least in a here-and-now sense. He was controversial for those who wanted the church to identify with the values of the age, and was cordially detested by liberal Catholics – I know of one progressive journalist who burst into tears at the news of his election – but in any serious audit of his life’s work, he emerges as a figure with a claim to the attention of secularists as well as Catholics.  ‘The thing you have to know’, said my friend who was on Pope Benedict’s staff during his time in charge of the Congregation of the Faith, ‘is that everyone, but everyone, who worked for him, loved him.

O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie: except the place is, in fact, buzzing in the run-up to Christmas. I had to squeeze between groups of American tourists to get into the little Church of the Nativity, built on the site where Christ was born. When I made it in, I created an impediment to the flow of pilgrims by kissing the ground near the star marking the place of his birth. Everyone who followed me did the same, with some effort on the part of the chunkier pilgrims.   It’s good news that Bethlehem is getting back to business. The shops selling nativity figures, Christmas decorations, pilgrim tat and olivewood rosary beads are hopping – the Nativity store where I got my souvenirs was stuffed with Polish pilgrims.

The Christmas present that comes with this article is an original artwork by Britain’s greatest living illustrator, Quentin Blake. By happy chance, this Friday – 16 December – is also his 90th birthday. Hip hip hooray! It is not the first illustration he has drawn for this magazine, which is why it’s very apt that he depicts an old Quentin speaking to a younger version of himself. From 1959, when he created one of the first illustrated Spectator front pages, through the 1960s, and occasionally after that, he has produced enticing Spectator covers to illustrate either the content or the season, including eight Christmas issues. His first Spectator cover was the issue of 29 May 1959.