Christmas Diary

Andrew Bolt 16 December 2023 The Spectator Australia

We’re home for the holidays. My wife insists: ‘We live in a resort!’ The neighbour’s roof is in front of us, but above that is Phillip Island, with the sea between, in Streeton blue on a bright day. So why be anywhere else? Sure, it’s not as pretty as the view from Westernport Bay where Greek triremes once set off to sail beyond the sunset, to that ‘untravell’d world whose margin fades forever and forever when I move’. But in this suddenly madder world we’re feeling blessed. We could be in Ukraine. Or Gaza.

My daughter is wise to me. She said I’ve mentioned Pieter Breughel’s?The Peasant Wedding?in my Christmas Diary for years. It’s true because it sums up my Christmas fantasy – tables groaning under the weight of the food. Elegant sufficiency is not a virtue in this home of the grandson of a man born in what later became a pigsty in the Friesian Gaasterland. So, no, I won’t mention that painting. Instead, the painting that’s stayed with me this year is one I saw in the flesh, so to speak, for the first time in June –?The Garden of Earthly Delights?by Hieronymous Bosch, a fellow Dutchman who specialised in warning, very Dutch-like, of the wages of sin in a world of lust. But what got me most, visiting it over two days in the Prado, was that it was the first thing Philip II of Spain saw each time he woke up in his tiny bedroom in the Escorial, his monastery palace. There’s a lot you can say against Philip. That he hung this memento mori at the foot of his bed is not one of them. For one, he knew great art had a moral function, and respected that.

It’s been a weird end to the year, and I don’t just mean the complete collapse into bathos of the Albanese government. For years, I’ve threatened to retire at Christmas and moaned each week to find myself back at work. ‘Was there ever a time when you were happy?’ snapped my boss the other day, which is rich from a man who put me onto the poems of Phillip Larkin. As many will find out again this Christmas, show a visitor the place you live, and you’ll love it even more.

But Albanese, seriously. Have you ever seen such an implosion? It’s hard to believe the referendum on his racist Voice was just a couple of months ago, on 14 October. Then?bang bang bang. Voice smashed, Albanese nearly in tears. More catastrophes followed: the humiliation of being patted in China as a ‘handsome boy’; China rewarding his deference by attacking our navy sailors; more statistics tracking our economic decline; and then – Albo’s big Christmas gift – releasing foreign murderers, rapists and pedophiles at a suburb near you. This is historic.

One of my producers at Sky, a third my age, today asked what I’m doing these holidays. It was so embarrassing. I know of columnists and TV hosts who live as the young would expect. Piers Akerman sails yachts to places I must double-check on Google Earth. Or that idiot Tucker Carlson bobs up by the side of the new chainsaw-wielding president of Argentina. ‘Er, I’ll be gardening,’ I confessed.

But the worst of it is that I’m loving it, even the mulching. The best is talking plants with Coral across the road. Her answer to any tricky question – like why aren’t my jacarandas flowering? – is always the same. Seasol should pay her a commission. But how good is a good neighbour?

I’ve been sending books to thank some of the guests who’ve put in on my TV show this year. Only some, because I’ve got exhausted and stopped. See, I’ve tried to match book to guest, but every time has been a wrestle. My problem – common to bibliophiles – is didacticism. Yes, I want to send a book that gives pleasure, but then I wrestle with the urge to improve them, or, God forgive me, impress. Most times I just get away with it:?The Islander?for Tara, my Irish producer;?The Persian Expedition?for Patrick Christys, gung-ho son of a Greek Cypriot; and Joseph Roth’s?What I Saw, with the prescient 1933 essay ‘The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind’, to inspire a fine researcher just starting out as a journalist himself. But I probably crossed my line by sending Greg Sheridan, a Catholic, Emmanuel Carrere’s?The Kingdom, a brilliant yet very self-referential retelling of the life of St Luke by a born-again agnostic. He’ll hate it. I’ve exposed myself with these gifts. Bottles of wine are so much safer – no wonder they’ve become Christmas currency in Australia.

My children are all home this year, so I’ve put up the old tree with six strings of Christmas lights and the big angel on the top. But there will be one dog and one person fewer. Miss you, Keesie. We’ll pour you a glass, Auntie Margaret.

AUTHOR Andrew Bolt