Have yourself a merry Corbyn Christmas…

If you think your Christmas Day with the relatives is going to be bad, be grateful that you are not a guest at the Windsors, the Corbyns, the Thunbergs or disgraced ‘mummy blogger’, Mother of Daughters. Guy Kelly pictures the scenes

There is but one sleep to go. The election has been wrapped up; your presents haven’t; office parties have created a year’s worth of anxiety dreams and HR complaints; workplaces have closed; truly misguided gifts have been panic bought (he still hasn’t used last year’s whisky stones); advent calendars look as if burglars have ransacked them; Brexit’s… oh never mind Brexit. And up and down the country, households are finally preparing to relax into Christmas.

For most of us, the next three days will be spent largely with our own families, for good or ill. Today will be spent fleeing down motorways laden with wrapping paper, crying children, sweating turkeys, and deeply suppressed grievances about in-laws, while everybody pretends to not find Michael Bublé a little bit creepy.

We’ll stand on heaving train platforms, evil-eyeing the word “delayed” and silently considering if having Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister might have been a small price to pay, if only he’d got the railways running properly again. We’ll tell ourselves we won’t check our phones for two days, because Christmas is about quality time: and quality time is about playing Boggle with our slightly racist aunts. We’ll be in our own private worlds. But what if we could peer into the festivities of some of the more newsworthy families of 2019? What if we could be a fly on the wall, as their day unfolded?

Well, thanks to the basic principles of time and space – not to mention strict privacy laws and budget restraints – we absolutely cannot do that. But we can use our imaginations.

So, sit back, pour yourself a morning sherry, and take a look at how the other half live. I guarantee yours definitely won’t be the most uncomfortable Christmas in the land.