Clarissa Tan

Does it really matter now whether the eurozone breaks up or not? The damage may already have been done, in terms of business confidence. A £10 billion bailout for Cyprus has been agreed, but nobody will forget that its people woke up one morning to find their bank accounts raided — something you don’t hear of happening even in developing countries. At the height of the confusion, Britain had to send out cash on a plane to its troops in Cyprus so they wouldn’t be deprived, a bit like a UN mission plopping food packets over stricken areas. The buzz is that Russian billionaires may now stage some sort of reprisal, but the real harm is that corporations, both large and small, will now be extremely wary of doing business in the eurozone.

I witnessed my first-ever PMQs last week. It was, as my friend and Spectator colleague Isabel Hardman told me, not a raucous a PMQs as can usually be. Yet for me, it seemed a pretty lively parliamentary debate and — at the risk of sounding hopelessly naive — a bit of a treat to actually see important things being debated for all to see. I wonder if UK politicians know that the Royal Charter they have drawn up may one day come back and bite their butts? For what they're proposing finally influences an entire nation's conversation. If they have their way, the UK is headed for press regulation, the first time its media will be under state licensing in 300 years. It's a sad hour not only for British journalism, I think, but for journalists everywhere.

I used to hang around a group of friends who worked for a British events company. Their boss was a keen follower of Buddhism and all things Oriental and, since the course of business never does run smooth, regularly consulted a feng shui practitioner. The practitioner, who wanted to be called Jampa, gave advice on everything from the setting up of a branch office to the placement of a goldfish bowl. He charged £500 a visit, with the viewing of two floors in an office counting as two visits. Jampa’s real name was something like Trevor Stevens, and in the days before he started donning the saffron robes of an eastern monk he was more often spotted in the crimson cloth of a Liverpool FC supporter.

What do New Year resolutions mean? Nothing, I have discovered, unless you resolve your old year’s first. In September I was diagnosed with colon cancer and since then, I’ve had time to think about time. It seems as though my past years have collapsed, one after another, one into the other, until I can see my experiences both all at once and as a long train of hours. Everything I’ve been has brought me to where I am now. I must look backwards to move forwards. I am not dying, yet I think much more about mortality. According to certain Eastern traditions, at the moment of death there occurs an unravelling — one revisits one’s life in reverse, unspooling from the Now into the Before, like a movie with the production credits rolling first.

Once upon a time, in a land so far away they had heard neither of Google nor of the iPhone 5, there lived a Queen so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her. Her eyes were as clear as a mountain lake, her skin as white as milk, her hair as golden as, well, gold. This Queen ruled over a land of perpetual Winter—indeed, of perpetual Christmas. The snow fell at opportune times, when everyone was prepared for it and felt ready to shovel, and it blanketed everything prettily, from the fir trees on the hilltops to the thatched roofs in the valleys. The snow was just right, too, for making snowmen and snowballs and tobogganing and sledding. And when everyone was tired of the snow it would magically stop snowing, and the sun would shine brightly (though not enough to melt the snow).