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And so the New Year begins proper, with reluctant children grumbling and slouching their way out of the door to school and Dad grumbling and slouching his way to the keyboard.

Scarcely seems worth the candle, does it? Aren’t these early days of January supposed to be the bleakest of the year for us?

This week, I can see why. On Saturday, I channel-hopped and found Splash, the latest reality show in which ‘celebrities’ are to be found. In this one. diver Tom Daley ‘mentors’ ‘celebrities’ learning how to…. dive.  Their efforts are judged by, among others, Jo Brand. I am not making any of this up.

It is, of course, presented by Vernon Kay and Gabby Logan, or rather, they are the “people-shaped things”, as Charlie Brooker would have it, responsible for reading out the script while staring uneasily at the cameras.

All the necessities of such television are there, I’m told: the pre-interviews, the post-interviews, the replays, the ‘training’ footage, the judges’ comments, the phone-in votes, the hooting baying crowd, the ‘cliffhanger’ results.

In other words, all the things that help producers spin a single second’s-worth of TV into an hour, with ad breaks.

But who am I to judge?

We went to the low-in-energy panto-by-numbers Dick Whittington at the Theatre Royal last week, where dear Basil Brush’s efforts to cattle-prod Dame Christopher Biggins into some sort of movement were pretty much all in vain.

Some of the ‘comedy’ – and there wasn’t much of it – included cultural references to the likes of X Factor and Strictly, and ‘celebrities’ like some woman called Rylan.

Well. They might as well have been speaking a different language for all Management and I could make of it. Or an eight-year-old and a six-year-old, more to the point. None of us had the faintest clue what or who they were on about, nor, seemingly, any of the other chattering, restless children.

So for all I know Splash could be a towering televisual achievement. In truth, it was a better proposition than Casualty if you loathe and detest cliché and banality, or whatever modish Scandinavian death-fest BBC4 is screening, gloomily. In these end days, perhaps Splash is as good as it gets.

Earlier, we had an interesting chat about religion.

Now, when I was a boy reporter, we always had a sex shop standing by. On a light news day, a carefully manufactured ‘rumour’ of the opening of a sex shop would easily take care of a hitherto empty page, once some moral outrage had been organised.

These days, the equivalent seems to be the mosque. Especially in the west. A rumour of a mosque opening can cause all sorts of trouble.

But the point that interested me, when this entered our conversation vis-à-vis a local disused Methodist chapel, was this: it wouldn’t be welcome because ‘they’ wouldn’t like it if we opened a church in ‘their’ country, would they? The point is good and accurate. No, they probably wouldn’t.

But aren’t we supposed to be better than tit-for-tat? Aren’t we supposed to try to make it possible for people to live together, rather than copy, and therefore reinforce, prejudice?

Of course, you cannot believe this to be the case if you have been staring at the Ulster bigots draped in the union flag on the news.

Religion is really best left alone, and that seems to be the heartfelt wish of the Church of England: to be left alone.

In the wider environment, it seems the Church is committed to fairness and equality so long as you’re not a weak and feeble woman.

Gay? That’s fine, so long as you don’t fancy a nibble at any point. Straight men can don Episcopal purple and hump like rutting stags in springtime for all the Church cares.

Women, naturally, are out of the question, shagging or not – unless, presumably, they’re gay, in which case slip into this chastity belt and step this way to the pulpit, your grace.

And in all this the Church of England is running scared of conservative evangelicals and African homophobes, putting politics above love. What a shambles.

Closer to the home environment, the church in our village, there for centuries watching over all this with a stony sneer, gazed expectantly up the path at midnight on Christmas Eve. And did anybody come?

No. For the first time in all those dusty years, there was no midnight mass to greet the coming of the Church’s big day. How sad. And what is the point of the Church not performing at the big gigs? How would the Rolling Stones fare if they played Liskeard Town Hall but refused the O2? Would Man Utd win the title if they played only Reading and saved on the bus trip to Liverpool?

Surely the Church needs to be on show at Christmas – how else are they going to have sinners like me captive in the pews? But no. Best spend time and money breaking the law by refusing women equal opportunity – for that’s what they’re doing – and requiring people not to have sex – for that’s what they’re doing. Bonkers. Barking, bonkers, loopy mad.

Which brings us neatly to Michael Gove, who has apparently decided there’s no place for creativity in his pathway to his much-loved English Baccalaureate exam, thereby occasioning at least one school in this area to look at teachers in the creative subjects with a speculative eye and a few fingers dancing over the staff wages spreadsheet. Who needs to know how to be creative anyway? Under price-of-everything-value-of-nothing shrivel-souled throwbacks like Gove, only their tax accountants.

The world is certainly conspiring to remind us that Christmas and holiday-time is over. Our boys dared snivel at dinner last night. Management, spitting tin-tacks and snorting acid flame from her flaring nostrils, sat the bastards down in front of her laptop and dialled up a school in Bangladesh and invited them to watch and then consider whether they had the first fucking thing in the world to complain about, apart from the people who allow such inequality to exist.

Tough for them to be moral and decent, I know: they watch football, and on the telly are role models like Luis Suarez, paid tens of thousands of pounds a week in a world filled with starving children yet lacking the grace and gratitude to behave decently. He cheats, he celebrates, he gets away with it. What a disgusting thing top-level soccer is.

Still, the kids are our only hope. Can we make them care for fairness and justice? Will they look at the world their parents made – not their grandparents, they tried to do better – and decide such selfishness and greed are not for them?  There’s enough of a challenge for 2013. Or any year.

Your homework, 1

Can I recommend this excellent and gutsy piece by Victoria Coren in yesterday’s Observer? It has a lot to say about the way the ‘celebrity’ culture with which we started this week’s epistle is taking over, even, justice.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/06/jim-davidson-arrest-standup-comedy

Your homework, 2

And finally this week… after Brother Hamster’s warm comment about the amount of this drivel you have to endure, here’s an idea – how about some guest columnists this year? Come on – 800 words or so to have a rant. It’ll do your blood pressure good. And it’ll freshen this up. Applications, please, soon as you like, Brothers and Sisters – use the e-mail link on this page. Blacks, dogs and Irish very welcome, as are gays, straights, putative women bishops, even – deep breath – Tories, though I’ll have to edit submissions in case anybody mentions a McAlpine. Over to you, Brother Hamster?