Society

There have been lots of wonderful answers to prayer over many years, including recently. One I remember was as a 15-year-old sitting in chapel with the prospect of three frightening tests that day, for which I had done no preparation, and praying that if I got through it then I would do anything for God. I did get through and did nothing about it, except forget about God. Another was praying about whether I should ask my future wife to marry me: I was sitting alone by a canal in Holland. I felt I should, did, and she said yes. It was a wonderful decision. The most recent was when

Santa Claus ate Father Christmas. It happened quite suddenly. Well, it took about a decade, but that’s suddenly in cultural terms. Over the course of the 1870s the venerable British figure of Father Christmas was consumed by an American interloper. Father Christmas (first recorded in the 14th century) was the English personification of Christmas. Just as Jack Frost is a personification of the cold and the Easter Bunny is a rabbitification of Easter, so Father Christmas stood for Christmas. He was an old man (because Christmas was ancient) and he was plump (because Christmas was a feast). But Father Christmas did not give presents, did not come down the chimney,

The good news is life begins at forty. The bad news is once you reach that milestone, you could struggle to get a mortgage. That’s what many prospective home-buyers have reported, believing age was a factor in their failed mortgage applications. Here’s why it has become an issue in recent years and what you can do about it. Why banks are reluctant to give mortgages to the over 40s According to research carried out by Nottingham Building Society, 25 per cent of those turned down for a mortgage said it was because they weren’t allowed to borrow for a long enough period or that they or their partner were deemed

My colleagues at the commercial and chancery bar are all at their chalets in Gstaad, funded by the endless fees from Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and the family bar are out en famille in Mustique, awaiting the festive fallout — there’s something about turkey, port and the Queen’s Speech that pulls marriages apart like a pound-shop cracker, and divorce doesn’t come cheap. But for we poor criminal hacks, it’s business as usual: crime never sleeps, and never less so than when Santa Claus is coming to town. As a junior barrister I made out like a bandit. Booze flows, blood follows; office parties are a magnet to drug dealers keen to

My mother is a good woman. But on being greeted by a charming golden retriever, a shaking red bucket and the dog’s well-meaning human handler from a local animal charity, a line had been crossed, even for her. Having already put her hand in her pocket for multiple charities in the town centre while Christmas shopping – from the wonderful Salvation Army brass band playing Away in a manger and the granddaughter she sent forth with a few quid, to the ebullient veteran who offered to pack her bags at M&S for a military charity – as a pensioner with no private income, she felt there was nothing more she could