AT Christmas time it seems nothing real must be allowed to impinge on a scripted narrative. I’m sure it’s a similar story in the other nations who belong to the world’s comfort zone. Thus the UK is almost entirely populated by an affluent and deliriously joyous class of people who live in massive houses. We know everyone lives in massive houses because the adverts that appear at this time of year all seem to have been shot in kitchens that are so big you expect they come with their own swimming pools.

Not all of the action takes place in the kitchens and dining-rooms, of course, but a hell of a lot of it does. There we see unfeasibly large tables that look like they have been recommissioned from the set of Downton. Every spare centimetre of their surfaces are heaving under a feast that would have got the Emperor Nero impeached for excessive consumption had it featured at one of his orgies. When the people who feature in these sybaritic cameos aren’t salivating at the prospect of getting tore into this assortment of food and drink they all seem to be preparing to lumber each other. They smile at each other while twiddling their hair and dipping their eyes shyly. Everyone looks like Phillip Schofield and Anthea Turner.

Each year the toys become more expensive and you find yourself counting the digits in the Recommended Retail Price that monetarily appears at the end of the advert. Is that £49.99 or £499.99? Of course it’s £499. The children are depicted as insufferably well-behaved and waxen-faced cherubs of the type you hope will grow up to be delinquent and experience spells in juvenile detention centres.

Our favourite television shows all seem to have been ordered to maintain this chimera of indulgence. The other evening I lost out on the toss of a coin and was thus impelled to watch Nigella Lawson cooking a Christmas dinner. Honest to God, the programme should have come with one of those warnings that tell us the following programme will feature sex and images that some viewers might find disturbing. Look, I quite like Nigella and am the uncertain owner of one of her cookbooks. On one occasion though, I over extended myself by trying to stick rigidly to the ingredients in one of her recipes. I began my mission in the supermarket not long after 9am and by the time I’d finished the sun was about to go down and there was a search party out for me.

The centrepiece of Nigella’s Christmas special featured a sticky toffee pudding like none I’ve ever seen and can probably only be obtained on the dark web along with Glocks and AK47s. Afterwards a host of what I presume were her friends and neighbours sat down to eat this banquet. They all looked like those affluent young things 30 years on who had featured on the video for Wham’s Last Christmas.

A few weeks prior to this Mary Berry – you know, the slightly older Julie Andrews lookalike on yon reality baking show – started her new television series. It’s called Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets and features Mary basically going around England’s grandest houses reading out anecdotes from the official guide book. Within a few minutes it was clear what was going on here.

The BBC obviously had a looming underspend situation and thus commissioned something that would soak up as much of its cash as possible for the least effort. Why is it that the BBC’s commissioning editors all seem to have been tasked with helping England’s aristocracy with the death dues on their country piles?

I acknowledge that no-one likes a cynic or a curmudgeon at this time of the year but a couple of things strike me about all of this choreographed affluence, consumerism and bonhomie: it must increase the sense of alienation experienced by the many who will never have any of these. With each year this carnival of excess starts earlier and the army of children who are forced to watch it with their faces pressed against the window gets larger and larger.

More chillingly, you wonder if the fake sense of happiness and wellbeing is just another device designed to lull the complacent and acquiescent into believing all is well. It falls into the same category as royal engagements, marriages and births; British military adventurism and elaborate sporting extravaganzas. These are all part of a successful and well-worn stratagem that have had spectacular results in the past in averting people’s eyes to the duplicity of the elites that run this country. These include those who voted against Scottish independence or for Brexit because they had been bought off with a mirage designed to appeal solely to their pockets.

Other more benign and well-meaning charades have recently become part of the alternative Christmas pantomime. One of them is the mass sleep-out when an assortment of celebrities and the merely affluent gather to sleep out in the open (under controlled circumstances of course) before posting meaningful and profound messages about their big adventure on Twitter and Facebook.

I’m sure their sincerity in this adventure is pure and their motivation unimpeachable and they believe they are raising awareness of the plight of the homeless. Perhaps they are; though a wander down any of Glasgow’s main shopping thoroughfares would also achieve that aim. But it is a boutique and manufactured exercise that carries not an ounce of the mortal peril and jeopardy encountered by the homeless every night of the year and especially at this time.

By the end of this week the cold snap that has engulfed most of Scotland and the UK will have turned into a prolonged spell. I wonder how many of those sleeping rough on our streets will have perished in it.

I long for the day when instead of an army of Torcuils and Julias camping it up in Edinburgh an army of the homeless at a given signal will rise up and begin a mass occupation of Glasgow City Chambers over Christmas. And that the rest of us would support it, not by pretending to sleep rough for a night but by bringing them food, drink and gifts during their occupation. And if it were to spread to other cities perhaps we might even have ourselves the beginning of a wee revolution.