Let’s hope for good cheer this Christmas

A couple of years ago, I saw a charming cartoon. A boy and a girl aged about seven were in an earnest conversation. ‘Of course I don’t believe in Father Christmas,’ said the boy. ‘But we’ve got to keep up the pretence for the sake of the parents.’ This Christmas, all over the world, many parents will be especially keen to dwell on the great festival’s innocent joys. Innocence: in many places the fear is that the glory of birth will give way to the massacre of the innocents. Like the shepherds, a large number of people are sore afraid. Unlike the shepherds, their fear has no relief at hand from the Heavenly Host.

A lot of friends have been converging on London, not all of them with glad tidings. A Lebanese family are especially happy to be here and they are still deciding whether to return home. For 50 years, they have had to endure intermittent strife. No close relatives have been killed – yet. But a way of life has been steadily destroyed. At the end of the 1960s, Beirut’s architecture was still predominantly Turkish. Under Nasser, Alexandria had lost much of its joie de vivre so Beirut had taken over as the discreet playground of the Middle Eastern rich. You could find every vice known to man, plus the ones the locals had invented. Those were the days. In recent years there has been plenty to remind us that vice and vicious are close linguistic kin.

The family, set on remaining anonymous, have a wine cellar in London. We drank Musar from a range of years: miraculous that the vineyards had been able to produce so much, most of it excellent.