Move over hygge, the Christmas book is back in vogue

Publishing is not an exact science — more like pinning the tail on the donkey, blindfold. At no time is this more evident than at Christmas. By long tradition the Christmas market has been the happy hunting ground of the Quirky Book, emerging out of nowhere to become a surprise bestseller and gift of last resort.

The heyday of this phenomenon was years ago, virtually part of folk memory. Ben Schott’s Original Miscellany of 2002 sold two million copies, Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves of 2003 two-and-a-half million. These glories were succeeded by such classics as Is It Just Me or is Everything S***?, Crap Towns, Bunny Suicides, Does Anything Eat Wasps? and The Dangerous Book for Boys.

Since nobody in the business ever knew which Quirky Book would turn out to be The One, for years the publishers chucked them into the shops in vast quantities, fingers crossed. There were years when the only practical way of assessing the wannabe QBs piled up in the bookshops seemed to be by the stere, as used for pricing up firewood.

Then fatigue set in and celebrity memoirs took up the Christmas slack: David Beckham’s pioneering triumph being trumped by Sharon Osbourne’s Extreme, before this market too descended into hopeless D-listers and unknowns, best summed up by the words “Kerry Katona”. Pretty much a dead duck now, the sleb-memoir, David Jason not withstanding.

Celebrity cookbooks continue: Jamie Oliver’s umpteenth, 5 Ingredients, may yet prove the bestselling hardback of the year. Quaint Enid Blyton and Ladybird spoofs are still thriving, as are temptingly tiny guides to salvation in the form of Little Books of Hygge, Lykke, Ikigai, Lagom and Silence. We are also, it seems, seduced by sympathetic accounts of caring for livestock — ovines last year; bovines this — with Rosamund Young’s reprint The Secret Life of Cows threatening to outsell Robbie Williams’s big Reveal.

Yet there is one surprising new trend. This Christmas the bookshops are full of actual Christmas books. In a year that has been fallow for bestsellers (even the head of Waterstones has admitted) the season’s most appealing books are properly seasonal, not blatantly silly.

There’s The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by the much-missed P D James. There’s A Maigret Christmas, full of poignant evocations of Parisian misery. There’s Wendy Cope’s styptic Christmas Poems. There’s Murder in the Snow: A Cotswold Christmas Mystery by the great Gladys Mitchell. There’s Nancy Mitford’s second novel, Christmas Pudding, nicely repackaged. And many more. Even a scholarly “biography” of Christmas by Judith Flanders. Almost a Christmas miracle, this.

The old, politically incorrect jokes are still the funniest

Promoting her new film Battle of the Sexes, the comedian Sarah Silverman has said there are jokes she made 15 years ago that she would not make today. “I am less ignorant than I was. I know more now than I did. I change with new information.” No self-criticising Maoist could put it better.

But then Matt Lucas too has been saying that these days he could not countenance doing what he and David Walliams once did in Little Britain, mocking anybody and everybody. “I don’t know how you can do it. I also don’t know that I’d necessarily want to do it at this time. What you have to do is live and work in the right time.”

Fair enough, I guess, for the comedians, so hotly pursued on social media if they offend. Where, however, does this leave those of us still regularly regaling ourselves at bath time with the classic recordings of the Little Britain radio shows, we who still mulishly love Marjorie Dawes, Denver Mills, Dafydd Thomas, Emily Howard and the rest of those appalling, brilliant creations? Must we too abandon these unholy pleasures? Or is there a dispensation allowed, so long as we acknowledge it is a relic of the past, an historic curiosity, no longer funny in the least? That might prove hard.

My goldfinch charm offensive

Something’s got to give, I conclude, recoiling from my latest credit card statement. Perhaps all that money I spend on sunflower hearts for the birds at £12.99 a bag?

But they mean the garden is full of goldfinches, these exquisitely colourful birds, so springy in their flight, so liquid and silky in their song, so gregarious and captivating. Often there are half a dozen on the feeder at one time: one of the joys of our Harringay home.

Yet goldfinches used to be rarely seen, living only in open countryside abundant in thistles. Their numbers in London have more than doubled in recent years due largely to increased feeding with nyjer seeds and sunflower hearts. Having started, it would be a crime to stop. Goldfinches in the garden are still cheaper, as well as more charming, than any West End show — that being the collective name: a charm of goldfinches.