Mary Beards reflects on what really lies behind our attachment to Christmas ritual and tradition.

In a special edition of A Point of View, recorded in Mary's kitchen as she prepares her Christmas puddings, she ponders 'why those of us who aren't particularly wedded to the idea of tradition for the rest of the year, fall hook, line and sinker for it at this time.'

'My hunch,' Mary says, 'is that our fixed traditions are about constructing a family identity for ourselves, about displaying to ourselves as a family - changing, expanding and contracting as families always are - what makes us 'us.''

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound design: Peregrine Andrews Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Reading of Dickens/Herodotus: Simon Slater Reading of Mrs Beeton: Ruth Everett

ARCHIVE

1. Extracts of Keith Floyd from A Farewell to Floyd, produced by Cactus TV. 2. The ancient recipe for Herodotus pudding is from Herodotus, Histories 2. 40.

With water companies reeling from criticism over sewage discharge and rising bills, Stephen Smith squelches through London's watery underworld.

'Descending into London's Victorian sewers', Stephen says, 'is like spelunking through the layers of the city's history, and reminds you that problems over water and sanitation have been the norm rather than an aberration' for centuries.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Zoe Strimpel on the joys of seeing the world through the eyes of her 9 month old daughter.

'Where previously I would barely have noticed them,' Zoe writes, 'I now size up trees from below in terms of buds, leaves, colour, height - and how all of these may look to my little lady viewed from her pram or carrier in which her neck swivels constantly like a periscope, or an owl.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Rebecca Stott ponders the task of clearing her Mum's house, and the enormous difficulty of dismantling the things her mother loved and that Rebecca remembers her buying from bric-a-brac and antique shops.

'The beauty of the objects in my mother's house exists in her artistry,' writes Rebecca, 'the way she had placed some of them so that the evening light falls on them, the way that the kooky little Italian lamp sits next to the framed print of the Venetian canal... the way that everything is in the place that she had chosen for it.'

It gets her wondering about how many other people are doing the same with their parents' homes, in towns and cities across the country.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Gray believes the British state is broken, and that we urgently need a new centre ground in British politics.

'Outside the echo chamber of metropolitan opinion', John writes, 'there is a restive electorate perplexed and discomforted by the country the UK has become'.

He says our politicians seem bent on continuing the status quo, seemingly unable to comprehend a surge in support for populist politics.

But he wonders if the election of Kemi Badenoch could be a first step towards creating something radical in a new centre ground.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

From the escape of Cholmondley the chimp from London Zoo in 1848, to Chichi from the Kharkiv Zoo in 2022, to a group of 43 macaque monkeys from a research facility in South Carolina last week, Megan Nolan reflects on the great annals of animal escapes and why they hold an almost mystical appeal to humans.

She believes the reason they are so potent is that they contain the 'dazzling knowledge that things which ARE so, need not REMAIN so'.

'In a week where it felt especially apparent that we have no meaningful ability to shape the world in which we live', writes Megan, the realisation that we can defy inevitability is intoxicating.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Sara Wheeler reflects on the valuable perspective offered by out-of-date guide books. They shed light on the life of the early traveler - advised to pack an iron bedstead and a portable bath tub - and reveal how destinations may have evolved or be frozen in time.

'The chief question I ask the old guides is whether the spirit of a place - the genius loci - can survive the upheaval of the years. Is the spirit of the place immutable or can it change?' asks Sara.

Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Co-ordinator: Liam Morrey Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

In the last of his essays reflecting on America's search for meaning, James Naughtie recalls a meeting a year ago with General Michael Hayden - the former head of the CIA - who, without fanfare, expressed concern for the future of US Democracy.

'I don’t know that we’ll come through this,’ he said. ‘Right now I think it’s about 50-50.’

James reflects on past presidents, such as Jimmy Carter, and his dedication to the promotion and protection of democracy around the world, and compares it to the present, as we enter the final days of the 2024 campaign.

What might a tight result might mean in the coming months? 'The system will be on trial,' he writes, recalling the legal battles over the 'hanging chads' of 2000 in which the fate of the nation was decided on just 537 votes.

Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

James Naughtie argues that a common American identity will be achieved - one day - despite the heightened political rhetoric around immigration, that is making it one of the most contentious issues in this year's presidential election.

He recalls Ronald Reagan's 'homely evocation of an American character'. For Reagan, James says, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses', had real contemporary power.

For many Republicans today, he says, it's a very different story.

But he sees signs of change. On a recent visit to the US border in Arizona, he met a 'cattleman of resolute conservative views in his 80s', who tells James that although he's fed up with armed drug runners using his land, he believes most people cutting through the fence are 'good people, in search of new lives'.

'The huddled masses will be absorbed... eventually', James writes. 'But the question right now is how much damage will be done in getting there - to the principles of their democracy, and perhaps to their precious belief in themselves.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

From the description of Alexander Hamilton as 'the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar', to Lyndon Johnson's depiction of Gerald Ford as a man who 'couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time', James Naughtie argues that American political language has long been teeming with insult.

He recalls as a student in 1974, queuing at the back door of the White House one evening and coming away with transcripts of the Watergate tapes, full of 'expletive deleted' notes 'that blacked out various Nixon explosions.'

But in our own time, James says, something quite different is at play. The language of politics today, he says, 'instead of being punctuated by insults, it's become enslaved to them. And the more exaggerated political language becomes, the more it is devalued - because it has lost its true purpose.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

James Naughtie presents the first of four personal essays exploring America's 'wild search for meaning' in the run-up to November's presidential election.

From the freezing waters of Nantucket Sound in Moby Dick, via sunken levees of the Mississippi and the railroad blues of New Orleans, to the ‘raucous expeditions into an underworld of…richly wounded humanity’ in contemporary crime novels, James contemplates this moment in the United States through its fiction.

Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith