I’m with Melania on her grump about ghastly Christmas stuff

There exists a certain sort of female personality in which incandescent sexual allure is combined with a permanent undertone of simmering rage. Its fictional ur-type is Pamela Flitton, the luminously toxic wife of businessman and politician Kenneth Widmerpool, anti-hero of Anthony Powell’s novel cycle,

A Dance to the Music of Time.

The public utterances of Melania Trump are so sparse that it is hard to gauge the state of her inner life. But more than a touch of simmering rage is revealed in recently published tapes of her conversations, secretly made in 2018 by her former friend and senior adviser, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.

“I’m working like my ass off at Christmas stuff. You know, who gives a f--about Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?” the First Lady declared.

When it comes to Christmas stuff, je suis Melania. I cherish the joy and hope of Christmas; but the attendant stuff, not so much.

In this of all years, you’d think there might be an excuse to swerve the tyranny of gifts and banish such seasonal inedibles as mince pies (or, in Melania’s case, the 200lb gingerbread house festooned with edible wreaths). But apparently not: as farmers grapple with the conundrum of producing diminutive turkeys for Covid-restricted family gatherings, and the Prime Minister promises to “do everything we can to make sure Christmas… is as normal as possible”, the avalanche of Yuletide tat gathers pace.

The spiders and pumpkins of Hallowe’en still infest the supermarket shelves and online sites, but already the grim march of Christmas trumpery has begun. Anyone fancying a Skid Row-themed Christmas should hasten to the M&S website, where a pack of

four alcohol-themed glass baubles ( gin, prosecco, beer and vintage red wine) is available for £12.50. As Melania almost put it, in her reluctant incarnation as the First Lady of Christmas Present: “We need to do it, right?”

A crowd of 5,000 mourners attended Verlaine’s funeral at the Batignolles cemetery in Paris on January 10 1896. Gabriel Fauré played the organ and a dodgy cove called Bibi-la-purée took the opportunity to pinch 14 umbrellas – all in all, a resounding send-off. But now the French president, Emmanuel Macron, is considering a petition demanding that the unquiet poet’s remains be reburied, along with those of his fellow-poet and sometime lover, Arthur Rimbaud, in the Panthéon, resting-place of Voltaire, Dumas and Victor Hugo.

The French culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot, supports the petition, declaring that “to bury these two poets, who were lovers, together in the Pantheon would be a profoundly timely gesture”. We occupy an era of such timely gestures: well meaning, no doubt, but sometimes oddly insensitive to the humanity of the iconic figures in whose name they are made.

Rimbaud’s great-great niece, Jacqueline Teissier-Rimbaud, pithily observed that her ancestor, who now lies buried next to his sister Vitalie, “didn’t start his life with Verlaine and didn’t end it with him; these were just a few years of his youth”.

If all those petition-signers gave momentary consideration to how they’d like to spend eternity buried next to their worst-ever partner, they might allow Verlaine and Rimbaud to rest, separately, in peace.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion