On Tuesday, a Christmas miracle. Not only did my niece, nephew and I all test negative for Covid, so did the cast of the Old Vic’s production of A Christmas Carol. After days of uncertainty, our longed-for outing was on. I warned Edith and William in advance that I would probably cry and so it came to pass. I wept copiously, while they rolled their eyes. In the interval, I tried to explain that because Dickens’s story has to do with regret – with choices wrongly made and paths never taken – its wondrous power only grows as you get older. What I didn’t tell them, wanting (probably naively) to preserve their innocence, is that its central message could at this point hardly be more necessary or less likely to be heeded. How loudly the “be kind” brigade trumpet their compassion on social media! And yet how rarely, on the part of their noisiest and seemingly most virtuous members, does this involve any kind of challenge. Their mercy extending only to those of whose behaviour they wholly approve, they could hardly be more different from dear Bob Cratchit and sweet-hearted Fred, both of whom love Ebenezer Scrooge – or try to love him – in spite of his great miserliness, and who, when he wakes on Christmas morning a changed man, accept in good faith his newfound generosity, the former resisting the urge to call “for help and a strait-waistcoat”, the latter practically shaking his uncle’s hand clean off as he welcomes him into his home. Outlaw country In the Sheffield suburb of Loxley, a local teacher, Dan Eaton, has found a carved cross that he believes marks the site of the birthplace of Robin Hood: a discovery made, somewhat conveniently, behind the playground of his school. Naturally, the council is thrilled. Here is more grist for its “Bring Robin Home” campaign (Hood has been associated with Loxley since the 16th century). But the people of Nottingham remain unconvinced. “Robin Hood is as much from Sheffield as Jarvis Cocker is from Nottingham,” says Merlita Bryan, a Labour councillor and the current sheriff of Nottingham. For her, Hood is properly Robin of Locksley, named for a long-lost village in Nottinghamshire. When I was a child, my father, who lived in Loxley, was quite determined to claim Hood as a Yorkshireman, a conviction born mostly of the fact that such a proto-socialist could not possibly have come from somewhere as far south as Nottingham. But out and about, his stories weren’t hard to believe. It was on ghostly Loxley Common, where the bodies of criminals were once gibbeted, that outlaws were supposed to have lain in wait for travellers from York. Walking our lurcher in the gloaming, I always felt afraid; as the sun sank, you practically ran towards the shop that marked the border with civilisation and not just because it was the only place for miles about that had a reliable supply of the semi-illicit and noisy sweet known as Space Dust. Glimpse of light From Loxley, you can look across the valley to Lodge Moor, Dungworth and Stannington, places where, at this time of year, people traditionally gather in the pub to sing village carols. My favourite Stannington carol is Hail Smiling Morn, a version of a glee (or part song) composed in 1810 by the comically named Reginald Spofforth. Its words (I know them by heart) describe a sunrise that “tips the hills with gold… at whose bright presence darkness flies away”: lines that speak so marvellously well to this time of year, when the winter solstice has passed and we begin to inch ever closer to the light.