MY favourite Christmas story is The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen. Almost 180 years after it was first published its themes carry a wretched resonance in modern Scotland. 

It tells the story of a poor, young girl trying to sell matches in the street in freezing temperatures. She must persist as her father will beat her if she returns home empty-handed.

The passers-by ignore her presence and in a forlorn bid to keep out the cold she lights up her matches and sees visions in them of that which she cannot have: a roasted goose, a brightly-lit Christmas tree. 

Soon, she sees a shooting star and recalls the words of her grandmother, the only person who had ever truly loved her and who had told her that this signified another soul reaching heaven. When she sees her dead grandmother in the flame of another match, she lights the rest of them to keep it alive. 

The little girl freezes to death and her grandmother bears her soul to heaven. When her body is discovered the next morning, those who had ignored her when she was alive remark upon her smile. 

The little match girl would have had company in 21st-century Glasgow. Understanding Glasgow – The Glasgow Indicators Project, reported last year that of Scotland’s four largest cities, Glasgow suffered the highest levels of child poverty, rising from 27.1% in 2015 to 32% last year. 

The Scottish Government aims to reduce child poverty to 10% within the next seven years and to under 18% by next year. Someone within the government even applied one of its fatuous and offensive slogans to this hopelessly optimistic target. They called it Best Start, Bright Futures. It should simply have been called Bleak Futures. 

The Glasgow Indicators Project points out that “if Glasgow were to meet this interim target on its own, its child poverty rate would need to drop by a further 14% in the next year”. 

The SNP has been in power for 16 years during which rates of child poverty and multi-deprivation in our poorest areas have remained stubbornly high by every single measure. 

Last week, Humza Yousaf said that the only way to make Scotland a Tory-free zone was to vote SNP.

Yet what’s more urgently required is to make the country an SNP-free zone. This party has been bad for the nation’s health. 

Affluent trolls
ACROSS the UK at Christmas, thousands of latterday little match girls and little match boys are forced to press their noses up against the windows of the rich and the famous as they luxuriate in their wealth and good fortune. 

In previous ages, deprived children were usually unaware of the great social divides that consigned them to poverty and gifted others their privileges. In the 21st century, each Christmas we insist on rubbing their noses in it. 

Each year, too, the corporate forces of capital compel us to start Christmas earlier to maximise their profits. Soon, the first Christmas adverts and television trailers will be starting when the children return to school after the summer holidays.      

Over the course of two months, starting in November, television and streaming platforms portray the country as a Xanadu of extraordinary wealth and good cheer. Middle-class people dominate this fake land of plenty as they sit around inordinately large tables groaning with enough food to feed an army. 

They all seem to live in wood-panelled mansions. It’s an exercise in mass trolling by an affluent few on those whom our governments choose to take the brunt of their “tough economic decisions”.  

Food for thought
SOCIAL media also turns into a forum for affluent and successful people to display their comfortable lifestyles at this time of the year. 

The Herald:

Thus they feel compelled to post pictures of their culinary prowess featuring dishes and ingredients that none of them had ever contemplated until they received their Nigella cookbook last year. 

Being an amateur gourmand has replaced adventure treks up Mt Kilimanjaro as the preferred performative lifestyle accessory for the indolent bourgeoisie.    

I fled Facebook owing to the tendency of otherwise decent and cautious people to post snaps of their unlikely gastronomic creations. 

It screamed: “Look at me – there is no end to my talents.”

Now, it seems that Twitter/X has also suffered an invasion of the fricassee fetishists.

Mussel bound
AT least you can rely on the New Yorker magazine to do food porn properly and with some style. 

The other week its admirable restaurant critic gave us this little delicacy from a menu she described as speaking “with self-effacing directness”. 

If this is them being self-effacing, I’d love to see them when they’re being bold: “There’s also cerebral playfulness: mussel toast; a wedge of thick bread spread with aioli and piled high with shelled molluscs in a tomato-tinged sauce, is effectively cioppino minus the broth.”

See that mussel toast, see that brothless cioppino … pure different class.