“A Renaissance man.”
“A sort of East End [James] Joyce.”
“A f*** ’em Jew.”

I don’t know if Kay D’Arcy is Jewish. Probably not. But there are undoubtedly a great many Jews who are like her — well past retirement age, overflowing with chutzpah, and possessed of the “showbiz gene”. And many of these could, and just might, follow her example.

When former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic recently claimed at his war crimes trial in The Hague that he should be “rewarded” for his actions in the 1990s Bosnian war, Sally Becker suggested on Twitter that an appropriate reward would be a nice “rest” at the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo.

Whatever one feels about the current 50th birthday of the Beatles’ first single being celebrated somewhat more widely — and wildly — than the 90th anniversary of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses (not to mention Aaron’s Rod by D H Lawrence and Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf), there is no denying the 1960s’ evocative power.

I remember my father once telling me about an occasion when he ran into somebody with whom he had been at school several decades earlier. This man had done very well in business, as he explained to my father before asking him what he did. “I’m a photographer,” my dad replied.

Fourteen years ago, on January 20 1998, Chaim Bermant — still the most celebrated of all JC writers — died suddenly, a month short of his 69th birthday. This was a death that not only brought grief to his family and close friends but one that delivered a blow to an entire community.

One of the most salutary effects of ageing is the realisation that the advancing years do not necessarily bring wisdom or emotional maturity. When something goes wrong, you still look for somebody else to blame. If you break a vase, you curse whoever left it in your way, and any motoring mishap is inevitably the other driver's fault.

Will there come a time when the only readily available copies of new books, including all prayer books and even the Bible, will be electronic? Are the People of the Book destined to become the People of the eBook?

For many twitterati and "kindlelach", this is a cyber consummation devoutly to be wished - certainly outside the liturgical sphere.

Writer, composer, art expert, educationist - George Whyte modestly concedes, when it is put to him, that he is a man of many parts, and adds: "All of them Jewish".

It's that time again, the candle-maker's moment, when rival faiths strike festive lights to ward off winter. When an assemblage of "old" dates in the diary gives way to a fresh "new year". A secular, inverted Yom Kippur, a stocktaking accompanied by feasting instead of fasting, replenishing rather than repentance.

On this occasion, though, for me it carries some weight.

A great many Seder tables next Pesach could feature an imaginative presentation of the Passover story in the form of the New American Haggadah, which will be published in the UK in February.

It hardly needs stating in a Jewish newspaper that racism is one of the most odious aspects of so-called civilised society. And perhaps the saddest of racism's manifestations is that which occurs within sport - the activity devoted to harnessing human aggression to the concept of fair play.

Of course, racism in sport does not exist in isolation.