Christmas diary

Andrew Bolt I 14 December 2024 I Spectator Australia

Christmas at our home this year is the festival of the risen dog. I mean no disrespect to Christianity, and point out the analogy is really with Easter, anyway. But Sally and I are celebrating having Ralf still with us. There was a weekend in November where we were sure we’d have to call in the woman with the needle by the Sunday. Ralf, now 14, had no strength in his back legs and had fallen flat on his face three times, leaving him panting. Yet here he still is, our phlegmatic and adored Lapphund. This morning Ralf again barked and barked for his walk, but now seemed unfazed when he once more face-planted three times. Each time he rose again, tail still up, and sniffed his old sniff-haunts, avidly reading with his nose his doggy emails. So we are family still.

I’ve learned with age – now being 65 – that we love most the things that soon die. Dogs. Flowers. Sunsets. Each other. It’s something that’s made this past year my sweetest yet. I wake up to look over the Cootamundra wattle below our window and see the rising sun colour the sky above the bay, as my darling wife sleeps beside me and Ralf dozes on his mat. I know this won’t last forever, which is exactly why I’ve wrung so much joy from it every day. True, this Christmas isn’t like I’ve always planned. The children won’t all be with us until Christmas night, with my eldest first celebrating with in-laws-to-be in Sydney. But seize the fleeting moment and love it even more for being just that.

I’ve had my quietest Christmas period in years, and I thank Qantas for that. I drove from our town to Melbourne airport to fly to Sydney for my boss’s party, but I should have read the omens in this decaying state, its sky darkened by the smoke of a firebombed synagogue. For a start, I again had to dodge potholes on country roads where my wife has already burst two tyres. On the way, I called cousin Michael, a policeman, who told me how grim Australia now seemed from his drug-busting work: cocaine – once the drug of choice for the wealthy – is now sniffed up even the nostrils of the poor. En route, I picked up a footstool from Rob, the Chesterfield guy, who said business in Melbourne was sick and he relied instead on internet orders from the rest of the country.

So why should I have been surprised by Qantas? The pilot announced he was so pleased with us all for settling so promptly into our seats, but, alas, his engineers had found one of his engines running too hot. He’d try to get us another plane, but after an hour told us it was hopeless. By then Virgin had jacked up one-way tickets to Sydney to more than $900, but no plane could get me there on time, anyway, so I drove back home. I vented to a friend, a travel agent, who said the Qantas fleet was now so ragged that three Melbourne-Sydney flights had been cancelled that day and eleven delayed. Victoria is stuffed, with the rest of Australia not far behind. Anthony Albanese will pay at next year’s election.

The late Rod Menzies, who made his fortune cleaning offices before becoming an art dealer, once advised me to buy paintings that had a ‘good hang’. He meant the painting had to have size enough to pack a wallop. It wasn’t advice I could use at the time, with the money I was earning and the school fees I was paying. But now I’ve got lucky at an auction with a picture by my friend Tim Storrier. Boff! It hits me every time I walk past on the way to my bedroom. Tim hates discussing his paintings, but he reads the Speccie and must put up with this. Thing is, art has opened my eyes to colour.

Just the other night, I said to Sally, ‘That’s a Tim Storrier sky!’ The sunset was indeed a glower of red under a vault of indigo blue pricked with stars. At other times, it’s a John Peter Russell sky – a flush of powder pink, with violet, lilac and mauve. As for the sea, I’ve seen it change with the seasons and light, from Van Gogh green to vivid Streeton blue. Art has been one more joy that blossoms with age and makes life richer. I visited the grave of Van Gogh and his beloved brother Theo this year, past a wheat field with crows above the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, and gave thanks.

Something else that has improved with age is Michel Houellebecq, to me the world’s greatest living author. He’ll never win the Nobel Prize for literature, of course, having mocked Islam. I’ve just finished his latest – and, he says, last – novel, Annihilation. It’s baffled many critics, not least because important plot lines suddenly disappear, unresolved, as the chief character discovers he has cancer. The knock on Houellebecq has long been not just that he’s rude about Islam, ‘the most stupid religion’,  and is a ‘misogynist’ who writes porn, but that he writes as if there’s nothing left of life in the  West but sex, cynicism and anti-depressants to boost your serotonin.

Yet with each passing novel it’s become clearer to me that Houellebecq is, or has become, deeply spiritual. The last three paragraphs of his penultimate novel finally introduce Christ, and the very last words of this last one tell us we need our ‘wonderful lies’. If lies they be. So, yes, life looks bleak in our Christ-killing West, but as his last character in his last book faces his own annihilation, Houellebecq gives us in these final pages an unexpected and rapturous autumnal beauty to match Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs – the beauty of things that must perish too soon.

Andrew Bolt hosts ‘The Bolt Report’ weeknights at 7p.m. on Sky News Australia.