Christmas is nigh. This is Yule time, and before Christmas was inserted into the Julian calendar (to deputise for the pagan festival), this was the time of hunts, communal meals of the sacrificial meats, and drinking from the bloody beakers to ask Odin and the old gods for peace and good harvests. Today, we hunt for car parks rather than wild boar, we ask whatever listens to please give us not a bounteous harvest but a short queue at the checkout, and on the 25th we drink eggnog or beer rather than animal blood. Traditions change. It is the way of things.

Here in the subtropics, Christmas is sticky and close, with summer rains and cooking sun. The lawn grows ten centimetres a week; if left unchecked it could swallow an M1 Abrams in a month. So these last workdays before Christmas ride on the hum of lawnmowers and weedcutters. It has been a year of noise – with houses all around mine being rebuilt or renovated. Tradesmen arrive before six in the morning, and noise next door persists till seven at night. It has brought out the curmudgeon in me, and I’m not proud of it. I wish I were the kind of writer who could open the gramophone baffles to full and pump the room with the rough I exercise to (a bit of Wolfmother or Deep Purple or Black Keys) to drown the drills and saws and Victas, but I can’t. My aging analogue brain needs quiet for thinkerage.

So, I have decided, for Christmas, I shall ask that Greek/Turkish Saint Nicholas (who died in 343 and was reborn in 1821 as an Arctic elf who not only rewarded good, but guided birch rods in parents’ hands toward miscreant children) for a genius. Not a genius in the Einstein/Turing/Mozart/Michelangelo sense, but in the ancient Roman definition. A genius was originally a tutelary deity: a spirit guide for a person or a family. The word comes from the Latin verb meaning 'create', or 'bring into being'. I think a genius would be extremely handy. It would be quite a relief to be able to shift responsibility for creative input (or lack thereof) to a muse or a guardian angel or a benign faerie. It would be lovely to have something aside from myself to blame for a lack of well-written sentences at day’s end, or a paucity of good ideas in a pitch document. It would be quite the crutch to have something other than willpower to obviate the noise and spur the pen.

Of course, there would be a downside to a genius. Any good work that I did happen to accomplish, I’d have to share the credit for. And it would look ungainly on a book cover or a title credit: Written by Stephen M Irwin and Genius.

Damn. There is always a catch. Nuthin’ for nuthin’, as they say.

So maybe the best thing to ask for, or hope for, is just a bit more peace. Everywhere. In the streets, in the office, in the heart, in the mind. Whatever you believe – in God or the Tao, or that the old ones still sing under the stars on the heath, or that a fat, jolly elf (sans birch rod) visits from the North Pole with gifts for the good – as this year ends, I hope you have a bit more peace. Or, as my father would say (and this is my first Christmas without him – I miss you, Dad): 'All you wish yourself.'

Thank you for visiting.