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From the Reverend Richard Coles:

 I was talking a funeral the other day at the crem, and as I stood outside watching the hearse slowly purr towards us, a mourner took my forearm, his face grave and said ‘Vicar – you’re a terrible dancer.

 The timing might have lacked sensitivity but I cannot fault his judgement. I am a terrible dancer, confirmed for millions by a Pasodoble on Strictly Come Dancing that looked like a nerve agent taking effect on a somnolent gnu.

 In spite of Anton Du Beke telling me I had a lovely line, it was rightly my farewell to dance. I can’t complain, but it was tough to be sent home. Partly because it felt like being back at school – the last one picked for football – but mostly because we were having so much fun.

 When, in age, do you get the chance to spend time thrown together with new people doing something hilarious and exhilarating? How many fat 55 year olds have descended to a dance floor in a white suit on a fluffy white cloud, playing a golden harp to the Eurhythmics? How many clergy of the Church of England have learned the rudiments of a backflip with Aston Merrygold, and spray tanned with Debbie McGee? Not many.

 And for good reason, said some for whom my early doors couldn’t have come early enough! We can argue about the propriety of a parson cavorting with the lovely Di Buswell, dressed in what looked like a string bag made of tinsel, but more absorbing for me was trying to figure out why Strictly was so exhilarating.

 And I think it was because it was like playing again, being a kid, and the boundless delight of falling out of trees – only more so, and with physiotherapy… and pay.

 Play fades so quickly from our adult lives, when we’re meant to put away childish things. But at Christmas, I still get a whiff of it, drawn to the child in the manger: tiny, vulnerable, but the king of kings. And for a moment, I forget the prose of daily life in the poetry of his life, and the boundless joy and love and light he brings. Happy Christmas.