This is the year in which Michael Gambon died, so by definition a grim one for theatre. Of all the tributes, one of the most acute was by Tom Hollander, who recalled how expressive Gambon’s voice was after 30 years on stage. He could reach hundreds of people while seeming to address only one or two. That’s essential theatre acting. When Gambon turned to cinema, his voice had become supple and mellow. It set me to thinking of other great cinema voices. Simone Signoret came first to mind. Then Jeanne Moreau, James Mason, and above all, Henry Fonda. These actors have you at hello. I would have added Marlene Dietrich, but if you can be so easily parodied, can you be truly great?

A Los Angeles record producer tells me that teenagers no longer consider actors as role models. The young value authenticity, and necessarily actors pretend. Musicians don’t. Taylor Swift and Harry Styles have taken over from James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. ‘Timmy Chalamet,’ he said, ‘had a vogue for six months but it’s over now.’ I wonder if this is true. We still go principally to see actors, not plays. In 1985-87, Anthony Hopkins played more than 370 performances of three productions in the 1,200-seat Olivier Theatre without a single ticket unsold. Those of us involved in those memorable seasons never imagined there was any reason except the greatness of Tony. If he came back, it would happen again.

The French have always been better at protest than the British. Parisians are furious about the litter of directive street furniture which makes nonsense of the Rue de Rivoli. They’re doing everything to bring pressure on their mayor, Anne Hidalgo. In London, like the Kinks, I always loved viewing life from Waterloo Bridge, relishing those smoky black-and-white images of men in bowler hats forming a river on their way to work. Now the bridge has been uglified into a militarised crazy golf course, which plays havoc with its Portland design. The museum quarter in South Kensington does without traffic signs altogether and, as far as I know, nobody’s been killed. I’m all for bicycle lanes, but environmental measures which do not measure beauty  are profoundly anti-environmental.

Why are the print newspapers which are loudest about freedom of speech the ones which forbid it themselves? The paper I have taken for the past five years has, in that time, not published a single article by a socialist. If anyone from the left is quoted, they have to be mediated by a trusted house journalist, whose job is to contextualise. Well-known titles, all with falling circulations, love to condemn no-platforming in universities, but Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere both no-platform with a ruthlessness which makes student unions look permissive. How can you publish editorials condemning censorship if your own practice excludes all views which engage with your own?

Our family has always had retrievers, but we recently decided to make a change. My wife asks what can have been missing in her life that she was so fulfilled by the love of a Parson Russell terrier. When I met other Parson owners, their first question was always: ‘Is yours as mad as ours?’ Every afternoon, Otto ran round in circles growling at imaginary enemies. A few weeks ago, after a day of sustained love and closeness, he panicked at the sound of fireworks, crashed through the garden fence and drowned in a neighbour’s pond. I keep thinking of Alexander Herzen who said of the death of his young child that short-lived flowers have the brightest bloom. When Tom Stoppard included the line in The Coast of Utopia, I thought the sentiment brutal and inhumane. Now Otto is dead at ten months, I am not so sure.

A word, please, in memory of Christopher Hudson, the former literary editor of The Spectator, who died on the same day as Michael Gambon. Christopher was the kind of courteous scholar Cambridge was meant to produce, but rarely did. He invited me in to write in 1970, making me, I guess, one of your longer-standing contributors. He also asked me to lunch at the magazine with Enoch Powell, who was insufferable throughout. What Powell said was bad enough but the way he said it was worse. He affected an orotund Ciceronian rhetoric, designed to steamroll everyone else, particularly women. It occurred to me later that Margaret Thatcher developed her own over-emphatic style in order to get a word in edgeways with her friend Enoch.

A number of commentators have compared Suella Braverman’s hot jets of misanthropy to Powell’s invocation of ‘rivers of blood’. But there’s a big difference. Powell had an impact. Dockers marched, racism was licensed and life became more unpleasant for people of colour all over Britain. Braverman, boiling the bones of dead Israelis and Palestinians to make her culture-war soup, had little effect. She just left the electorate wondering how much lower any Conservative could sink. A question to which we will no doubt have a spanking fresh answer in 2024.