As you open this today, most of you will be thinking more of what you will be opening tomorrow.
Those presents are no doubt sitting under the tree, looking enticing. I hope you are not sneakily feeling them under their wrapper to guess what they are.
I can’t help wondering what some of our leaders and movers and shakers will be hoping for and what we might be wishing on them.
For David Cameron perhaps one of those life enhancing experiences.
I thought maybe a wife swap but that seems too extreme, so perhaps a month on a council estate in a two-up, two-down, so he can see for himself how the other three-quarters live.
He might like to take some of his millionaire chums in the cabinet with him. I am sure they and us will benefit from the experience.
Ed Miliband could get a makeover, which includes being given a personality. He is bright and well meaning but I can’t help wondering if he is really from this planet. Perhaps he is a spy from Kepler 22-b, the earth-like planet recently discovered. But if they are advanced enough to master space and time-travel I would have hoped they had gone beyond Keynesian economics. Nick Clegg just needs a few friends. Voters would be an even better Christmas present but, in these austere times, that might be well beyond what we can afford. So a few friends will have to do. He can speak several languages and allegedly has a brain the size of a planet yet no-one appears to like him.
A friend who worked on the FT once told me of a colleague similarly endowed in the cranial region. The whole country and Government hung on his every word on matters financial but he could not operate the snack food dispenser in the office and used to keep shoving money in and pressing every button until he got the snack he wanted. So perhaps being clever is not enough.
I would like both Stephen Fry and Jeremy Paxman to find holidays as Santa’s little gift to them.
That way we get a break from what seems to be their ever present faces peering at us from the corner of the room. A holiday for them and us.
Speaking of which, if Ed has mastered time-travel perhaps we could return the favour and send Simon Cowell to Kepler 22-b. I bet ‘find a second-rate popstar’ reality shows are just what they need in the farther corners of the galaxy.
With regard to our local MPs, perhaps Ed’s machine could project Kelvin Hopkins out of the 1970s, when, I admit, life and politics was a little clearer.
Nadine Dorries could be sent for a month to a Trappist monastery, where they only speak when necessary, and idle talk is strongly discouraged. And yes we know that times are grim but could someone buy Andrew Selous a smile and tell him it is not a sin.
Gavin Shuker does not need any presents because, by the look of his face, every day is Christmas Day.
‘Call me Dave’ should give Richard Fuller a job, to calm him down. And for Alistair Burt, I just hope the Arab Spring does not turn into a Siberian winter, of which it is eminently capable, and in so many ways.
Whatever you get for Christmas, I hope it is what you wished for and makes your day.
In the last two weeks I have been to both the Black Country in the Midlands and Woking in the south.
It is like visiting two separate countries. The Black Country is highly urban, very diverse, busy and buzzing.
Woking is very rural, with trees everywhere, mono-cultural and everyone lives in houses the size of small hotels.
The main sports are jogging and trying to manoeuvre Chelsea Tractors down narrow country lanes. In the Black Country the football teams supported are West Brom and Wolves, while in Woking it is Manchester United and Barcelona.
It must be difficult to govern in such a way that satisfies both of these parts of England but it might help if both were equally represented in the corridors of power.
