A SMALL Victorian mudlark, his face streaked with soot and the muffler round his neck pocked with moth-holes, gazes through the frost-rimmed window of a toy-shop, his eyes wide as he drinks in the wonders on display.

He looks to the starry sky where a jolly red comet streaks across the firmament, and a single tear runs down his dirty cheek. “I wish...” he says in a quiet voice. “I wish...”

Then, his shoulders slumping dejectedly, he begins to walk through the piles of snow back to the hovel he shares with his mother, father and 16 siblings. There is no point in wishing, not for the likes of him.

But hold! What is that will-o’-the-wisp that darts between the high walls of the darkened alleys? It is a fairy, flitting on hummingbird wings, and she emerges, dancing on air, from the shadows to hover in front of the astounded child.

“It’s nearly Christmas,” she says. “All little boys deserve at least one wish.”

Then the door of the toy-shop is thrown open and a laughing fat man in red suit and black boots beckons the boy in, showing him the delights of all the latest toys. Curiously, this being the late 19th century, there seem to be a lot of tablet computers, robots and other hi-tech kit.

Then a ruddy-cheeked woman bustles in, bringing with her a table that magically fills with mouth-watering food, more than a whole African village could eat in a month. Suddenly the toy-shop is full of gamboling elves and laughing people, and the boy is handed a huge plate of sweet stuff and unlikely meat combinations, such as a quail shoved inside a duck shoved inside a turkey.

Then the lights fade and the boy goes to the window. The street outside is now a muddy battleground, where shell-shocked men emerge from trenches on a grey morning. They circle each other suspiciously, then one of them produces a battered leather football.

Slowly, uncertainly, the men begin a game of football, gathering pace and increasing in joy until the enemies have become, at least for a short time, friends united by the horrors of war.

Then the boy is dragged back to the party, and a sea of celebrities bearing trays of chocolates and frozen individual lingonberry cheesecakes dance around him, inviting him to fill his little belly.

The fairy takes his elbow once again. “I said every boy should have a Christmas wish,” she says. “What was yours?”

The boy replies: “I wish... I wish all the supermarkets would stop insisting that Christmas begins at the start of November.

“Moreover, I wish that said supermarkets would not spend obscene amounts of money trying to outdo each other with cynical ads that are designed to tug the heartstrings of consumers into spending their hard-earned cash with them but which simply come across as crass and distasteful.”

The fairy shrugs, then helps herself to an individual lingonberry cheesecake.