Melanie McDonagh

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.

The loneliest thing about being as long-lived as the Queen, at 96, is that you have few or no contemporaries. Few people reach her age; indeed, not that many people remember the time before she became Queen in 1952, 70 years ago. She has been, simply by living for as long as she did, the one element of continuity in the life of the nation.  In the 70 years of her reign everything changed – Britain just isn’t the country it was then, for better and worse – but the Queen was a constant. Her presence in parliament, at great events, on the BBC on Christmas Day – even on our stamps and currency – gave Britain an extraordinary psychological stability during a period of upheaval.