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Good morning. ‘What I have to reveal to you, Angela, is very important’ – almost every day over the last six months the face and message of my would be psychic guide has popped up in my in-box. Handsome, intense, his eyes fixed on me alone. He warns that my miseries are due to negative energies from my past and that I am besieged by hostile astral forces. If only I would watch the attached video and send a contribution (credit cards acceptable) he could guide me to the happiness and wealth I truly deserve. I have to confess that some part of me, not a part I approve of I hasten to add, is quite susceptible to all this. I love the idea of being special, of striking cosmic gold. When it is particularly bad I have to stop myself reading the astrology columns. Lots of us dream of knowing things that others do not know and using our knowledge to our own advantage. It’s that instinct to be an exception, to be at the head of the queue, to win where others fail. It’s why some seek out those in the know for investments tips, or even sneak out before dawn to buy loo-roll. The tendency to think ourselves special has always been part of our national life - we are an island after all and prone to think ourselves exceptional. Yet today we are like stuck traffic. We just have to wait our turn. For the vaccine to work, for the rules to change, for our lives to be given back to us. My favourite feature of the Christmas story is the wise men who followed the star to Bethlehem. The poet W.B Yeats wrote about the Magi ,describing them as ‘the pale unsatisfied ones’ in ‘their stiff painted clothes’. I think he saw them as people who’d been good at prising out secrets. They’d done well for themselves, they’d taken their opportunities and had their successes. And perhaps they set out to follow the star hoping once again to be ahead of the game in the quest for ultimate fulfilment. Yeats doesn’t tell us if they found what they were looking for. He leaves them at Bethlehem being confronted by a howling infant, what he calls ‘the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor’. An early Christian writer thought that the wise men were in fact magicians, who came not to worship but to surrender, to give up their claim to be superior and special. That’s why they bought gold and frankincense and myrrh, tools of their mystical trade. But there is no magic in the stable, no special knowledge, no secret advantage. Instead there is raw humanity and hope. In the supermarket, the post-office the one room flat, the hospital ward. We may be unvisited but we are not unblessed, today or ever.