“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde

"Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas". Calvin Coolidge

From a quick glance at the papers, sitting in a doctor’s waiting room recently, it’s hard to feel optimistic about the world that we risk bequeathing to our children.

Jair, foul-mouthed Bolsonaro, Brazil’s zealous, misogynistic, repugnant and ignorant leader, like Trump, supports the torture of human beings, the loosening of gun laws and the destruction our precious Amazon rain forest for development. I say “ours”, because our forests, in whatever country they grow, belong to all of us. Nations, although they own the soil, can’t own trees.

Both these men have managed to synchronise their rhetoric and bravado with the frustration and anger of the millions, who voted for them and gave them their trust. As my wise Russian mother used to say to me when I made misguided choices– “it will end in tears.”

Bolsonaro seems to have a similarly reckless, antisocial and profoundly blinkered attitude to the future of sustainable life on our planet as Trump. They’re ‘born again’ fascists, would be dictators, profoundly foolish men and birds of a feather.

Trump supports the fossil fuel industry, sees ever more guns as the solution to the problems of escalating violence, and doesn’t believe that some of the world’s biggest corporations are continuing to threaten all of us with further catastrophes caused by wild-fires, floods and climate change. He’s blames the press for the increased hatred and violence that he himself has been busy stirring and stoking.

So far, I’m only reading articles that make my normal state of optimism shudder. And they get even worse.

“Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970”, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation".

The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF (The World Wildlife Fund) and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.

Closer to home, some of the biggest letting agents in the UK are actively discriminating against private renters. One in three renters receiving housing benefit are locked out of homes they could otherwise afford, pushing them closer to homelessness this Christmas. The numbers of homeless people sleeping rough on our city streets is still growing. The UK’s biggest care home business is up for sale. Many of our care homes have long been property businesses with minimum care attached and too many cases of abuse. And for the icing on the UK’s cake today, despite the chaos in our parliament, and despite the many warnings by those with far greater intelligence and prescience than politicians, we’re still hurtling towards the biggest episode of self-harm in our history – the delusional fantasy and nightmare of Brexit.

I’m still waiting in this beige room. I put the dispiriting newspaper down and pick up a typical waiting room magazine. Hair loss ads and properties for sale, most of them for in excess of millions of pounds. Another cause for pessimism.

What would ten year olds - girls and boys - be feeling about all the horrifying news from around the world, about the folly of Brexit here in the UK, about the price of somewhere to live and about the burgeoning statistics of homelessness and people sleeping rough on our city streets and in the doorways of retail stores as winter bites.

Despite all of this, my optimism is still there, like a few burning embers that still flicker when the fire’s been doused by water. I believe the embers will reignite what’s left of the fire and continue to brighten and become the fire that embers want to be.

I think that Trump will soon be gone, that Brexit will pass like a scary nightmare and that as the younger generation wakes up around the world and decides to address major issues like poverty, hunger, useless wars, wildfires, climate change, healthcare, care for the aged, the loss of our animals and the abuse of our planet, that we will see a recovery of common sense, of kindness and of fair and just collaborative governments, gradually taking the reins from the many self-serving and blinkered fools that lead too many of the world’s nations today.

Oscar Wilde once said: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

I hope the stars will bring us the inspiration and above all the resolve to dump the flurry of self-serving leaders who’re causing most of our world’s miseries today and that new and enlightened leaders will tear the reigns of power from this sorry assortment of reckless criminals.