John Osborne, in A Better Class of Person, his wonderfully downbeat memoir of a suburban upbringing, remembered that after the turkey and pudding had been eaten, someone would always announce: “That’s another Christmas done with.” It was part of a family trait of exhibiting “a timid melancholy or dislike of joy, effort or courage”.

In the press this year, Christmas is already past its “best before” date. “Peak Christmas” announced the FT Weekend magazine at the very beginning of December. On its front news page “fungus and disease” were the two horsemen that spelt a “not so merry Christmas for tree growers”. Wet and warm weather had meant Christmas trees had “grown too quickly, too skinny”.

Warned of this blight on evergreen hopes, readers of several papers might have noticed a large advertisement for a tree that “will look beautiful and draw compliments, from Advent to Twelfth Night”. The advertisers proposed their own version of the celebrated Turing Test (in which a computer is deemed to have intelligence if an interlocutor cannot distinguish its answers from those of a human being).