THE MOST HIDEOUS character produced by that brilliant cringe-fest The Office Christmas Party was not David Brent, but Anne, the resident working parent. Thrusting her pregnant belly and gruesome intimacies into colleagues’ faces, expecting smokers to be ashamed for sparking up near her unborn child, she was the epitome of pushy, indignant, self-obsessed modern motherhood.

“All I care about is my little boy, my husband and this baby,” is her refrain as she brags about jumping the queue at Disneyworld by lying that her child was terminally ill. As Tim, The Office’s moral heart, points out there probably were real sick kids waiting in line. But Anne doesn’t care: me-first has become an acceptable parental refrain.

Perhaps there is a touch of Anne in most mothers. When I see a non-parent parking in those supermarket mother and child bays which I use even though my sons are perfectly mobile, I feel a rush of righteous indignation. And at the scrum to board an easyJet flight, I swan through when “families with young children” are ushered to the front, leaving childless couples on romantic mini-breaks to spend the journey apart.

Parents do have significant needs but has the moral climate shifted too far? For example, in my South London manor, a lobby group has had cars banished from Dulwich Park. Much rejoicing from parents whose offspring can zip around on microscooters unendangered by traffic. So what if frail elderly folk cannot enjoy being driven around by their carers? Or workers can’t drive in and snatch a picnic lunch? Likewise, elderly local people, who have exercised dogs in a nearby communal garden for 40 years, have recently been stopped by a parent-led campaign.

Now, I loathe cars and have violent fantasies about crap-and-run dog owners, but I have started to feel uncomfortable about how the moral mace of motherhood is now brandished.

The cry “women and children first” has ceased being about lifeboats and become about life itself. Pregnancy has been elevated from normal lifestage to a state of grace. Expecting your firstborn has always been a time of special personal importance, but now it is one which must be acknowledged loudly and publicly. Baby showers must be thrown by friends, fusspot food requirements catered for, colleagues must cover so that you can get an early cut.

This huge sense of entitlement just leads pregnant women to feel smited and ignored when someone, for example, neglects to stand up for them on the Tube (and in two London Transport pregnancies I experienced almost unfailing courtesy). Maybe the world is busy reading the paper and hasn’t noticed your elevation to Virgin Mary.

Not only do the Anne brigade regard the lives of the childless as trivial, but they show no common cause with other parents. Give up driving my kid to school in a huge people carrier to help to reduce the incidence of child asthma? Pul-ease! They demand society to be “family friendly” but the only family they are friendly towards is their own.

Boo hiss

Every Boxing Day we enjoy a slice of traditional, look-it’s-him-off-the-telly, thigh-slapping, innuendo-soaked panto. But, boo hiss, this year Wimbledon Theatre was closed, so we trekked to Greenwich for Mother Goose and an afternoon of political correctness.

This goose was organic, free-range and came with a side order of gags about the evils of GM crops and food additives which sent my husband’s eyes a-rolling. I doubt the children present understood these references, so why hector adults with tired agitprop?

Key to the plot was the intervention of the Red Squirrel Brigade, aka Comrades Bushy Tail and Nutkin. Our garden squirrel population does, indeed, resemble a guerrilla militia: they know the terrain better than us, make ruthless, lightning raids on strategic targets (ie, ripe figs, newly-planted bulbs) then disappear into the landscape.

But isn’t it distasteful for a panto to make larky references to the Red Brigade, a terrorist group infamous for kidnap and murder? It reminded me of a Chinese restaurant in Camden called The New Cultural Revolution. What next? The Year Zero nightclub, the Shining Path garden centre, the Holocaust Bar & Grill?

It's our tune

As I schlepped about wrapping presents and serving up endless meals, the Christmas No 1 single, Mad World, played constantly on my internal jukebox: “All around me are familiar faces, worn out faces. Their tears are filling up their glasses. No expression ... No tomorrow . . .”

My sister-in-law, who gave me the single, wrote out the lyrics, so on Christmas night, to the incomprehension of all men and women over 45, we performed a maudlin karaoke. Then, at a friend’s on Boxing Day, we sang it twice, swaying, holding imaginary lit matches over our heads and cackling like fools.

Now I am a very old and responsible person, nihilism and melancholy are wholly incompatible with my life, particularly while staging Christmas. But Mad World beat more cheerful tunes for the top slot. Not, as the Daily Mail suggested, because we are a miserable nation. To the contrary, there is nothing more cheering than sneaking off to your teenage bedroom (even a metaphorical one) for a dose of self-pity and alienation.

Goodbye to all that

I’M IN DISGRACE for whipping down the Christmas tree at midnight on New Year’s Day. I know about Twelfth Night, but it looks so tawdry and irrelevant on January 2. I’m going to chop it up and burn it, along with old Christmas cards.

Then I’m going to patrol the house with a black plastic bag, throwing away every broken object and unloved toy. I’m also seeing how long we can survive without visiting Sainsbury’s by cooking ingenious, yet oh-so tasty, meals with existing supplies. After Christmas a kind of consumer nausea always makes me as thrifty as an austerity-era housewife. Weeks of self-indulgence induce a perverse pleasure in self-denial.

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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