It’s a season brimming with tradition and, as longtime readers may know, my own custom has been to try, in the last column before Christmas, to find a few reasons to be hopeful. I was planning on doing that anyway, but my resolve was sharpened by a conversation with a reader who called in to last weekend’s Guardian and Observer charity telethon. Tammy, who is 75, made her donation but she also had a simple, if fathomless question: “How do we live in this terrible world?”

She proceeded to rattle off just some of the things that led her to put the question so starkly. She talked of the ongoing bloodshed in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza; she sighed at the imminent return of Donald Trump. And this week brought two more items that could be added to her list.

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