“It’s the most wonderful time of the year”, sings Andy Williams, in the shmaltzy festive song that always makes me lunge for the radio. Before I can switch station to Yesterday in Parliament or a rerun of the Covid Inquiry, he is already carolling: “It’s the hap-happiest season of all.”

Really? For anyone over 20, I’d say ’tis the season of blisters, headaches, sleepless nights, dawn raids and overdrafts, all to avoid the risk of social death and family breakdown by being considered a Scrooge.

Statistics show that moving house, divorce and getting married are high among the most stressful events in people’s lives. Strangely, they make no mention of Christmas shopping, even though it’s one of the most competitive, physically exhausting, nerve-racking, protracted and pricey activities known to humankind.

Added to which, unlike changing address or finding a new spouse, we have to face it every year. By the time the gifts we have agonised over have been opened, there are barely 11 months left before we need to get going again.

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Health tsars annually denounce our calorific intake on Christmas Day, yet they ignore the need to replenish our reserves after weeks of hunter-gathering that would put our Cro-Magnon ancestors to shame. Even if we’ve bought online, the headlong dash down the stairs several times a day to pre-empt the courier’s knock burns off the pounds like a blowtorch.

On reluctant forays into the city centre’s glitziest emporia........

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