Melanie McDonagh

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.

Under the sink. That’s where most of us will be keeping a stash of candles in case the lights go out this winter on account of an erratic electricity supply. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself in darkness and not remembering where you’ve left the candles and the matches. Be prepared. We’ve got out of the habit of using candles except for dinner parties, so we’ve lost touch with our inner chandler. Not many children go to sleep looking at night (tea) lights because they’re afraid of the dark. So I sought out the founder of Candle Maker Supplies off the Shepherd’s Bush Road in London, David Constable, who remembers the 1970s when blackouts meant everyone using candles. His tip: chill your candles before using them; that way, they last longer.

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.

The bad news of the week is that Jeremy Paxman is retiring from University Challenge. The worse is that most of those lined up to succeed him are nothing like as good. University Challenge is a quiz show that JP has very much made his own: the curled lip, the incredulity at culpable ignorance, the reluctant admiration when a team really does know its stuff... it’s all part of the Paxman persona. At least on air it is: I do know one acquaintance of his who declares that for Jeremy Paxman to sparkle in private life, he really needs a camera permanently trained on him, to give the illusion that he’s actually on air.

If there’s one thing that gives a bad name to gender stereotyping it’s the Disney princess: a combination of hideous synthetic fabric and a noisomely winsome concept. And yet the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutiques at Disney Parks are popular with families as a place where their offspring can get dressed and styled as their favourite Disney characters, i.e. princesses or, in the case of a smaller number, knights. Now, the Streaming the Magic blog – which posts on Disney Parks – reports that: Disney Parks’s website itself now refers to ‘Godmother's Apprentices’.

One of the pleasures of the letters from unhappy ministers to the Prime Minister last week (though not, presumably, for the recipient) was the assortment of letterheads from Whitehall departments we saw in the papers. One was from Nadhim Zahawi, on HM Treasury writing paper. It’s a fair bet that most of Mr Z’s communication these days is by email or text or WhatsApp. Yet when it came to calling for Boris Johnson to resign, nothing would do but a letter with the Treasury insignia to indicate that the writer was staying where he was. There are so few opportunities nowadays to show off a letterhead that they have become a special medium.