Christmas is fast approaching with all its love and glory!

Apart from peace, happiness and goodwill to all mankind, I want to wake up on Christmas morning like I did as a little boy... I would like to smell the sweet pine needles of the Christmas tree.

I want to jump out of bed, put on a blue flannel dressing gown and sit cosily on an armchair opening wrapping paper of every colour.

Christmas is a time for presents and most of us don’t just love receiving presents but also feel the need to give them. Cynics may say it’s merely pushy manufacturers and shops desperate to cash in on what we blithely call the festive season who make us feel this sense of obligation.

I think there’s a deeper reason. The French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss was clearly on to something when he showed in his seminal work The Gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, that the urge to exchange presents is deeply entrenched in all societies around the globe and has nearly always been invested with a great deal of meaning.

In our privileged world, we have a deep-seated urge to express our love and admiration with gift giving. It also goes some way to making us all feel better about the matter. It isn’t crass commercialism - it is a biological imperative. We must deal with it.

I may be 69 but I would be delighted to find that new book I had heard about but forgotten to write down or a travel gadget I will never understand how it works.

I want an abundance of relevant and irrelevant things. But, most of all, I would like a long luxurious holiday to the city of my dreams, Istanbul, a beautiful city on the Bosphorus which is crackling with creative innovation, from new nightlife hotspots to ambitious contemporary art venues — all set against the perennially breathtaking backdrop of timeless Byzantine and Ottoman beauty.