I often find that what I am doing turns out to be what the rest of the world is doing, too. This is bad news for people in the news business, because I have abandoned them. I am not watching, reading or tuning into the news any more. Perhaps TS Eliot was on to something, and “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

I gave up on the Today programme a while ago. Who wants hectoring at breakfast? It must be 18 months since I last watched the BBC News at Ten – and I count Huw Edwards as a friend. I still take The Telegraph, but Matt is the only thing I look at on the front page.

The result of this self-imposed news blackout is being less informed but much happier. I pick up the gist of what is going on in the world in passing, but never get bogged down in the depressing detail. As a consequence, I have had a very merry Christmas – thank you for asking. Triple-jabbed and masked, I have been out and about as if there’s no tomorrow. (Perhaps there is no tomorrow? I wouldn’t know.)

On Christmas Day, 18 of us enjoyed a festive family lunch at The Wolseley on Piccadilly. On Boxing Day, I had hoped to catch my grandson in Beauty and the Beast at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, but, maddeningly, an omicron outbreak among the cast meant the performance was cancelled.

Instead, I went to see Cinderella in Richmond. It was musical, magical and marvellous, and Strictly Come Dancing’s Anton du Beke as Buttons was a joy. Gloomster Chris Whitty may be tipped for a knighthood this week, but I am hoping there will be a gong for spirit-lifting Anton, too.

Here’s to Her Majesty and the widows of Britain

I did watch the Queen, of course. Her tribute to her “beloved Philip” was very moving. Her Majesty is remarkable. In my experience, most widows are. I made TV series with two this year: Maureen Lipman and Sheila Hancock, both Dames, both funny, feisty, formidable ladies, neither of whom complained about her widowed lot. At the end of a long working day, both would sometimes slip into calling me by their late husband’s names. They didn’t notice they were doing it, but it reminded me how the men they had loved were still very much part of their lives.

The composer and lyricist Leslie Bricusse died in October. He married his actress wife, Evie, in 1958, beating off some impressive competition (including Elvis Presley and Boris Karloff). “It’s hard,” Evie said to me on Christmas Eve. “We were married when I was 19 and that was a long time ago.”

A different friend, only in her early 70s, was widowed in September. “I have been in a brain fog since,” she told me. “I keep making simple errors. Another widow told me that she thought she was getting dementia for months after her husband died.”

There are three million widows in Britain. Here’s to them and their stoicism.

Farewell to Desmond Tutu

When I am asked to name the most charismatic characters I have ever met, the actor Vincent Price, the former US president Bill Clinton and Archbishop Desmond Tutu top my list. I went to visit Tutu at his home in Cape Town 20 years ago while he was being treated for prostate cancer and thought he might be dying.

“I wonder whether they have rum and Coke in Heaven?’ he mused. “Maybe it’s too mundane a pleasure, but I hope so – as a sundowner. Except, of course, the sun never goes down there. Oh, man, this Heaven is going to take some getting used to.”

I asked him what he would miss most about this world. “I will miss my family so much. I will miss the rugby and the cricket and the soccer.”

What would he be glad to leave behind? “Personally? Illness, exhaustion, the diminishment in one’s powers. I will be glad, too, to say goodbye to hatred and war and injustice and oppression, to the long, ragged lines of refugees, to all the things that have scarred this beautiful planet. I will be glad to be somewhere where you know accidents are not going to happen anymore.”

He took me out into his garden to watch the sun falling on Table Mountain and smell the flowers. “God is good, man,” he said, beaming at me, “and he is waiting for you.”

Gyles Brandreth’s childhood memoir, ‘Odd Boy Out’, is published by Penguin Michael Joseph