It was Friday, December 26, and already dark. Torch in hand I was proceeding in single file with four members of my family, including my brother-in-law, Joaquin. In the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees we were trying to make it through from our ancient “castle”, l'Avenc, to an outlying farm, to feed the animals. We were in a blizzard: a stinging, horizontal hail of snow carried on an icy northerly gale, shot-blasting our faces so that we had to turn our heads to one side as we trudged into the snow. More than half a metre had already fallen, and the road along the clifftops had disappeared beneath it. Every footfall plunged you in, up to knees or thighs.

Walking like this is incredibly difficult. After an hour, exhausted, I tried placing each foot squarely into the deep depressions left by Joaquin in front of me. Immediately it got easier. He was doing all the work now. “Mark my footsteps well, my page/Tread though in them boldly...” I hummed under my breath, amused.

Only then it struck me. December 26. St Stephen's Day - the Feast of Stephen. And I had never realised that the old carol offers, not spiritual guidance, but practical advice for snow-walking.

Oh, sister

“They're importing nuns now,” my half-Catalan niece said in a matter-of-fact way, “from South America.”

She had returned from visiting her Catalan great-aunt, a nun who entered holy orders as a novice two generations ago in an era when the calling was unexceptional for a young woman in Spain. Today the demand for nuns remains but the domestic supply has dried up. So where we British have Polish plumbers, Spain has Peruvian priests, South American sisters and Mothers Superior from Montevideo.

Never admit defeat

Recording UK Confidential, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, I discussed with fellow panelists Lords Owen and McNally (David and Tom) the confidential Cabinet papers just released under the 30-year rule detailing the late James Callaghan's 1978 agonies over whether, as Prime Minister, to call a general election in the year before he had to. The parallels with today were obvious.

Callaghan postponed, although Lord McNally, then the political adviser at No10, had urged him to go early. Labour's electoral support, he believed, was peaking, “though it might have been a submerged peak”, he told the programme. I like this submerged peak image: the rising to a pinnacle still not high enough to break through into a poll lead, before falling back. For Labour, it may be occurring this winter.

I suggested that a good chance of winning was surely not the only reason for calling an election. What about the argument that, although victory was unlikely, defeat now would not be as crushing as later? Was Callaghan deaf to this logic?

Obviously, both said, surprising me by their unanimity. Narrow defeats may save scores of parliamentary seats, launch strong Oppositions and lay the foundations for victory later; but no politician calls an election early (they insisted) if he believes defeat, even narrow defeat, likely. After all, something may turn up. This tells us more about the temperament of those drawn to politics than it does about electoral logic.

Off message

Have you received any of those unspecific “happy new year” text messages? Apparently, with one click you can send them to everyone in your mobile phone's address book. And we can reply (with one click on a template) “Thanks. And to you!” Eventually phones will be equipped to recognise festive messages and reply automatically without troubling us. Then - reductio ad absurdum - we'll all call it quits.

One of my first jobs as a Foreign Office junior in Whitehall was to draft standard good-wishes messages (or thanks-for-good-wishes messages) from the Queen on the occasion either of the national day of the foreign countries that my desk dealt with (when a message was sent in her name) or her official birthday (when she received one).

These salutations, bouncing nominally between heads of state, are barely noticed at this altitude. They arc their way up from junior officials, via foreign ministers' private offices, to royal (or presidential) staff for rubberstamping; then across the ether to their foreign equivalents; then down through private offices to the equivalent junior officials, to be filed. Effectively, junior staff in both countries are saluting each other at considerable public expense.

For festive greetings the IT revolution will achieve the reductio fast enough, and quit bothering. But for national salutations the Foreign Office still fails to see the absurdum.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone