Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud.

Each week we ask some of our writers to read their piece from the magazine, Loud.

I'm Max Jeffrey.

On this week's Christmas special, Peter Hitchens tells us about a Christmas he once spent in Bucharest.

Lionel Shriver says that nobody cares about the war in Ukraine anymore.

Ed West wonders whether you can meme yourself into believing in God.

Mary Wellesley reads her notes on St Nicholas, and Melissa Kite says that it took moving to Ireland to escape from the

EU's rules. First up, Peter Hitchens. I never intended to spend Christmas 1989 on a short break

in Bucharest. I had enjoyed a long, thrilling autumn in dark, sad cities in Eastern Europe, running and marching

with ecstatic crowds as they overthrew communism, but this had all been in the calmer, less exotic

regions of the Warsaw Pact, where dumplings were on the menu, passions were equally

stodgy, and both rebels and governments would rather hold press conferences than open fire on each other.

I was in lovely but dreary Dresden when news came that Nikolai Charsescu's Baroque dictatorship was

tottering, and my foreign desk urged me to head to Hungary and on into Romania as soon as the border

opened if it did. Air travel was impossible. It had to be by

land. At Shagad in Hungary, I came to the edge of the known world, gazing across the closed frontier

post into the dark, exotic chaos, so well described by Olivia Manning in her Balkan trilogy,

I knew no Romanian, I knew nobody in Romania. I knew next to

nothing about Romania. But the main thing was that I was there. And then the border opened.

More crucially, I had the permission of Mrs. Hitchens to cross it. I confess I more than half wish she'd forbidden me to go,

but she never stood in the way of any adventure. I crossed into Arad, where I'd changed the

last of my money into a wad of Romanian lay, literally the softest currency I've ever met.

...