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I was driving my daughter to school recently when we tuned into Heart Breakfast. A caller was attempting to answer five Christmas-related questions that, if successful, would mean that the countdown to the big day could ‘officially begin’. They weren’t hard but when the questions were answered correctly, there was pandemonium in the Heart studios. Everyone gushed with excitement and wished each other a Merry Christmas, co-host Amanda Holden cried, and the first of very many broadcasts of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ began. It was 10 November – more than six weeks before Christmas Day. It was so unseasonably warm that people were still in shorts. The

Norman Lebrecht, who attends concerts as frequently as falcons swoop over St John’s Wood, has declared 2025 to be a terrible year for music. We are at the mercy of political activists, he thinks, and he has a point. Zealots, particularly those who pursue pro-Palestinian causes, are relentless troublemakers for whom an undefended concert hall or opera house offers an easy target for protest. But for this concert-goer, 2025 was a wonderful year, in terms of quality and variety. So far the inventory reads 43 concerts and nine operas. Not the grandest of totals, and nowhere near a personal best, but a decent tally – with power to add, too.

It may come as surprise to discover that A Room with a View, the celebrated Merchant-Ivory adaption of the E.M. Forster novel, is 40 this month. Yes, as hard as it is to believe, the film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith had its premiere in December 1985 and went on general release in April 1986. Step back, if you will, from the baffling realisation that somehow A Room with a View is therefore exactly equidistant between the present time and the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945, and instead focus on a rather more cheerful point altogether. Because A Room with a View, the low-budget tale of mismatched

In search of coffee on my way to work the other day, I stopped short mid-way into a branch of a popular coffee shop when I noticed the digital ordering screens. Nothing will lose my business faster than being asked to queue twice and do the work of someone else for something simple. But these ordering screens seem to be becoming ubiquitous in our towns and cities, forcing those of us who have actually come into the office, likely to sit in front of a screen, to spend our lunchtimes also staring at a screen scrolling through options, when there is an actual human being standing behind a counter a

All I seem to do these days is stand in the school car park having anguished, if largely pointless chats: the Mansion Tax chat. But let’s call it the Mansion Tax Mumble, since none of us seem willing to disclose the actual sum we paid for our houses. Soon we may not have to, since if your house is worth more than £2 million it will become perfectly obvious: you may never move again. It may even become the ultimate status symbol. Anyone planning to sell a house at £2.1 or 2.2 million will have to forget it since no estate agent will bother; no viewings, no clicks, no calls.

There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school.  It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At least, not if we believe the recent Guardian ‘scoop’ which claims, thanks to the testimony of Nigel Farage’s fellow pupils (much of which was made public years ago), that the Reform leader was a racist, hate-fuelled youth who taunted anyone of a different faith or ethnicity. It all sounds pretty familiar to me, though my