The best Christmas gift you can give yourself is to learn some poetry by heart | 24 December 2019

Every Christmas I find I am living in the past. I blame my father. He was born in 1910 — before radio, before TV, before cinema had sound, so he and his siblings made their own entertainment at Christmas. He brought up his children to do the same, which is why my unfortunate offspring have a Christmas that’s essentially a century out of date. There are three elements at its heart: board games that end in rows, parlour games that end in tears, and party pieces performed around the Christmas tree.

I owe my very existence to my father’s love of board games. As a boy, his favourite was a game of military strategy called L’Attaque, invented in France in 1908. In 1936, the American property trading game Monopoly was launched in the UK, and my father, then a young lawyer working in London, was first in the queue at -Selfridges when it went on sale.