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There’s an old sweetie shop down memory lane. My wife still remembers the Woolworths in Urmston - with its squeaky wooden floors - where her grandma took her to buy aniseed balls long ago. And I remember the Woolies in my home town, where the floors squeaked, too - though to no avail, since my stern, Baptist grandma thought sweets were the devil’s work. But slap a “No entry” sign in the middle of this roseate road. It’s brands that matter, not bran tub nostalgia.

Old brands don’t usually die as floridly as Woolworths - dragons from the den poised for partial rescue or no - seems doomed to, taking tens of thousands of jobs down with it. Who, just to show that newspapers are brands, too, remembers the Empire News, the Evening News, the Daily Herald, the Sketch, the News Chronicle - and (George) Reynolds News, until the Co-operative Press took it over, turned it into the Sunday Citizen and dispatched it to an earnest grave? Instead of post-Christmas implosion, newspapers merely fade away when their moment has gone, with no Last Post for the Morning Post. One year soon it will be the same for the People, because it doesn’t have enough reading people left. Brands just run out of time.

The temptation, when such small disasters happen, is to wrap skeins of memory round the corporate corpse and see its death as some kind of punctuation mark to life. One January morning soon, there’ll be a big hole in Peckham high street, just opposite the hole where Marks & Spencer vanished amid Big Macs and Argos and mounds of red snappers piled on a slab. But tragedy? Not really, unless you work there.

If you’d been starting today - rather than 99 years ago, when FW brought his first five-and-dime store to Church Street, Liverpool- then you’d have given up hope in an instant. For who (save for five minutes before Christmas) wants a random collection of cheap shirts, knickers, wrapping paper, humbugs and cut-price DVDs? Who wants their windows so chaotically dressed that you have to go inside to see what’s for sale? Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. America’s Woolworths perished 11 years ago, ravaged by Wal-Mart, obliged to morph into Foot Locker stores to fill the last 400 holes it possessed along main street.

Britain’s remaining Woolies go along that path in this crunch, pummelled by Primark down the road, battered by Toys R Us, gazumped on wrapping paper by the market trader selling it more cheaply outside. FW had a great idea 99 years ago. But this is here and this is now: and what good ideas has even den-master Theo Paphitis got left?

So ask the essential brand questions again. Who, at the fag end of 2008, would think of spanning the earth with a chain of hamburger bars? Who would reckon it a bright notion to site upmarket chillers full of gastro-exotica next to the bras and jeans in M&S? Who would think of growing rich on flatpack kitchens or stiff leather sofas? One day soon there’ll have to be new answers here.

For the essence of retailing - the point about brands - is chop and change. One minute the world belongs to Foxtons; the next, mercifully, it doesn’t. One year the last real butcher down the hill gives up, slaughtered by Sainsbury’s; the next a master of meat moves in and has customers queueing round the block. Most of the time, these days, single-minded concentration on how you target an audience hits the spot. But there’s no reason to pile on too much heartrending significance here.

One of the reasons for boom and bust, however distressing, is the need for a simple cull. Unless Ford and General Motors get it in the neck, they’ll churn out gas guzzlers for ever. Unless the merchants of plastic tat feel pain, there’s never a spur to go one better. Something fresh and innovative in the high street beats more of the clapped-out same.

The decline and fall of Woolworths, then, is a cause for modest celebration as well as gloom, and politicians should keep their lamentations to themselves. When Peter Mandelson vows to save big players in trouble, he needs to ask why they’re in trouble, and wonder why famous names always fade away in the end. Old Labour? New Labour? One broken brand, or two? There’s something to suck on over the last bag of aniseed balls. As the last dragon in his den would say, I’m out.

p.preston@guardian.co.uk

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There is nothing quite so potent as cheap Christmas cards. I don’t mean charity cards, the sort that offer tasteful woodcuts, sharp contemporary graphics or well-done reproductions of old masters in return for your contribution to cerebral palsy or clean water. What I’m talking about are those cards that annually reshuffle a tiny repertoire of wayside inns, robins and snow-banked cottages, and then brazenly keep all the profits for themselves. The kind of cards, mostly found in large assortment boxes, that remain blithely confident that nothing says Christmas quite as instantly as the steeple of a country church smeared with some dandruffy glitter.

What’s striking is how all these favoured images hail from Britain’s pre-industrial past. So you’ll see cottages rather than suburban villas, pheasants instead of turkeys, coaching inns rather than railway stations. There may be squires and parsons and even a Regency buck, but you’ll search in vain for a factory manager or his clerk. There could be some peasants, skating across a low, frozen pond, but nary a factory worker in sight. It’s as if Christmas can only happen in a land known as Once Upon A Time.

The irony is, of course, that nothing about Christmas is quite so modern as this custom of sending cards. In 1843, the busy public servant Henry Cole realised that he didn’t have time to do the usual seasonal touching base with his vast social and professional network. So instead he commissioned an artist to knock up something suitable and then mailed it out to everyone in his address book. Sharp-eyed commentators couldn’t help noticing that Cole was the man who had recently helped set up the penny post. What better advertisement for the system’s reach and efficiency than an annual blizzard of envelopes arriving on the nation’s doormat?

So as far as conservative souls were concerned, this new custom of sending Christmas cards represented everything that was offputting about the modern industrial age. It substituted impersonal contact for face-to-face sociability. Instead of the personal letter or a firm handshake, there was a mean piece of pasteboard handed to you by a servant of the state. The cards themselves smacked of the tradesman’s quarterly bill, and there was something intrusive and coy about the lisping hope that the recipient might enjoy “every health and happiness” over the next year.

No wonder that it took about 30 years for the idea to catch on. For it was not until the 1870s that the nation got into the habit of exchanging illustrated bits of card each December with their entire social and professional network. No wonder, too, that after an early flirtation with a range of visual material, the Christmas card settled into endlessly circulated images of Britain from an earlier, pre-industrial age. It was as if the only way to offset the essential anomie of the Christmas card was to load it with images from a time when the bonds between people were organic and unforced. The wayside inn spoke of a habitual sociability between strangers; the partridge suggested a natural world that marched to its own seasonal rhythms; the village church stood for a community that honoured the hierarchical social bonds which Cole, with his tradesman’s sensibilities, had cut across so crassly.

And yet the fact that all these steeples and game birds and hostelries remain so prominently in circulation suggests their continuing cultural punch. For if the images really had ceased to mean anything, they would surely have quietly disappeared long before now. Just perhaps, deep down, we recognise and value them as symbols of social and ecological continuity. With our own Christmases continuing to stir up sharp anxiety about what really matters - public partying or private family time, retail expenditure or authentic emotional exchange, supermarket food or artisanal produce - it looks as though we hanker after the certainty of Once Upon A Time more strongly than is quite comfortable to admit.

kathryn.hughes22@googlemail.com

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John Pilger: Such an open day beggars belief. At this PR gala you will find no stall for the victims of rapacious British power

Letters: it’s still worrying that Lord Turner seems to believe that the continued growth of aviation is consistent with climate change targets

As I walked along the bank a male kestrel kept fractionally ahead, facing down into the breeze. Its hovering just above eye level was not particularly noteworthy, but its refusal to relinquish one spot of cold air over the dead vegetation did make me reflect. What could it see? Then it went down through the reeds. The cleanliness of its entry was like a paper knife between the flap and the envelope. Back up it came, as if the descent and rise were part of one sweet manoeuvre. Yet, for less than a second, perhaps, there was a slight laboriousness before departure. It was this that enabled me to pick out the pigeon’s-egg-sized bulge in the talons. The yellow scaled feet were so tightly closed over the prey that one sensed the beat had already gone from a tiny heart.

A life had passed so casually. A kestrel had taken its prey and flown off, all in a matter of seconds. A sense of ordinariness was already reassembling itself within the landscape. As I committed it to my notebook, I could find no false sense of drama to inject into the scene. Yet in a 40-year career I’d never seen it before. I doubt I’ll ever witness it again.

For, unmistakably, there it was, the pert upward jut of a wren’s tail in those claws. I’ve trawled the literature. I can find no mention of wren ever falling victim to kestrel before. (Although there is a reference to an occupied wren’s nest lodged in the fabric of a kestrel’s own.) It seemed so improbable that I paced out over the marsh to the exact spot where the falcon had landed and winnowed shreds of down from the body. I have them on my desk as I type these words - the telltale brown, barred flight feathers, so small that in full fan the wings would look nothing larger than a pair of earrings to adorn a pagan.

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Today’s corrections

Letters: You describe the former GDR People’s Palace as ‘a glass-fronted eyesore that served as a parliament and recreation centre’

Letter: It is clearly more newsworthy to be a politician than a journalist as Sally Murrer had to make do with only a passing mention

Letter: Debra Bell (Letters, November 27) is wrong to imply that cannabis use is on the increase

Letter: Clearly when horrendous cases like Baby P and the Sheffield family come to public view we should always have the appropriate inquiry into the individual case

Letter: In distancing Iran from the Arab Peace Initiative, Gholamhossein Mahmoudi (Letters, November 28) is correct

The arrest of Damian Green last Thursday, his subsequent detention and
interrogation, together with the police search of his home and his office in
the Palace of Westminster, constitute the most serious breach of the
privilege of Parliament in modern times. At least eight senior figures in
the British Establishment were involved; they either initiated the action,
agreed to it, conducted it, or allowed it to continue. Not one of them seems
to have understood how serious a “high crime or misdemeanour” they were
conspiring to commit.

Yesterday a Pakistani security official said that if India now put more forces
on to the disputed Kashmir border, the Pakistani Army would do likewise. By
the way, that would mean that Pakistan put less effort into fighting the
Taleban on its western border, he added, in an unsubtle warning to the US
and Britain. Pakistan understands only too well that for the West its border
with Afghanistan represents the frontline in the war on terror.

A theme of the autumn was Huge Salaries. Like giant hissing cockroaches they fascinate and repel. It is easy to grasp the idea of fortunes made by starting and selling a business: the weirdness begins when that familiar object, a pay packet, is inflated to insanity. I am always reminded of that nasty phenomenon the neotenous tadpole: instead of developing frog legs the small wriggling comma keeps growing until it is just a huge bloated head and lashing tail as long as your hand. Proper frogs wisely avoid it.

You may not have noticed it if you get most of your economic information from
media headlines, but there were some pretty important events in the world
economy last week - certainly more important than the Pre-Budget Report and
fatuous arguments about public borrowing and taxes under the
next-government-but-one in post-2015 Britain.

The British have always been beastly about the Swiss. Oscar Wilde thought the Alpine republic was inhabited solely by theologians and waiters; Sydney Smith argued that it was an inferior version of Scotland. The consensus seems to be that the Swiss did not deserve their extravagantly beautiful landscape. Ethnocentric claptrap, of course. We just resent that you can prosper by avoiding wars; wimps win. Remember that old Orson Welles line: “They had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

I was once told, by someone who knows about these things, that the key to being relaxed and happy is to fill your spare time with an absorbing hobby.

Shakespeare ou pas Shakespeare? Telle est la question. The French are replying with a resounding “oui”. The theatre scene across the Channel has become a kind of Paris-upon-Avon or Shakespeare-sur-Seine. There are, at present, more of his plays on the stage in the greater Paris area – six, to be exact – than by the most popular of classical French playwrights, Molière.

There are three events which will characterise the coming age. The first is the transfer of power from the nations gathered around the Atlantic rim to those gathered around the Pacific, which will not be smooth. We are reaching the end of the period of hegemony of Western values in international affairs and we will have to start accepting new governmental concepts if we are to have a rule-based global system.

It is right to try a variety of rapprochements between us and the Middle East, and to the political we might add cultural approaches. You never know; that might do the trick where hard diplomacy is always going to fail.

In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, wild speculations swirled, furious cyclones that threw up windy and wild theories, charged conspiracies and noisy condemnation. Inevitable perhaps, just human nature responding fearfully to sudden and unspeakable violence. The terrorists cleaved the body, heart and soul of this cosmopolitan, enterprising hub which draws to its bosom the richest and most wretched of the earth. What they did coldly in hotels, cafés and the Jewish centre was as atrocious as the killings in Beslan. But as the panic subsides, it is the duty of all world citizens to confront truths, however inconvenient.

Readers sometimes complain that newspapers don’t publish more cheerful stories. Eager to oblige, I would point out that, in a week of mostly grim tidings, from economic meltdown to terrorist carnage, there’s one bright spot. Ahead of the Nato summit, the US government has said that it will no longer demand “fast-track” membership for Georgia and Ukraine. “I am satisfied common sense prevailed,” Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian President, said on Thursday, even if the effect of his words was spoiled slightly by the fact he was in Cuba. The irony passed him by that, if Moscow understandably sees the former Soviet republics as its “near abroad”, then that is also how Washington sees Central America and the Caribbean.

As we learned about the harassment of Damian Green and his family, a lot of us wondered whether we were still living in Great Britain, or whether our country, which was once synonymous with its people’s freedom, had ceased to exist. It is absurd to compare Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith to Stalin and Mugabe, but righteous anger knows no verbal niceties. After Mumbai, it might seem wrong to refer to terrorism except literally. Even so, the assault on the Greens was a terrorist attack on civil liberties.

It is hard to see silver linings in those recessionary clouds, but if you peer closely enough, you might just make some out. Take this week’s Queen’s speech. The Government needs to make room on the legislative agenda for emergency action to alleviate the banking crisis. One casualty is the Communications Data Bill, which provides for the creation of a giant database of information about our telephone calls, emails and internet searches. No one with any grasp of Britain’s history of liberty will mourn that omission.