What we all need for Christmas is a little perspective

Perspective can be hard to find and even harder to appreciate. Having moulded my life into the rhythm of a daily print operation, looking further ahead than tomorrow has become a challenge.

Life, as they say, comes at you fast. And if it's your job to catch as much of it as possible, filter it, prioritise it, have an opinion on it and set it down in print before the next day's news-storm blows in, then perspective becomes both more important and harder to locate.

This year, it's become almost impossible to view the news without it being distorted by a Brexit lens. The B-word is everywhere: tacked on to the excuses offered up by struggling retailers; used as a label for political tribes; cropping up in market and economic analysis and hooked to every piece of news, good or bad. Some of this is reasonable. Much of it is not. Having declined to pick a side during the referendum campaign, I feel that this newspaper has retained objectivity. My evidence for this can be found in the folder of letters in my desk, variously branding me a Brexit-backing lunatic and an establishment Remain lackey.

I'm a eurosceptic, pro-immigration, liberal Tory and I back May's deal while cautioning against both a second referendum and a no-deal exit. From this position it seems there are clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right. While some embrace the high-octane chaos of no-deal, others have lost all sense of perspective in pursuit of anti-Brexit ideals.

The erratic peer Andrew Adonis says he would never work with or employ a civil servant who he knew to have worked on Brexit policy, while campaigning lawyer Jolyon Maugham has called for a general strike to bring the government to its senses. I would urge these zealots, and their opposite numbers on the Leave side, to calm themselves over Christmas. Go for long walks. Politics may be dramatic, and I don't wish to imply current debates are inconsequential, but when all is said and done a path will be found through this tangled forest of ideas and ideologies.

We are simply forging a new chapter in a book that will never be finished: it's the story of democracy and dissent, of risk and reward, and its telling will be all the better if both author and audience can find a little perspective. Brexit has a few more hills to climb and doubtless a few more depths to plumb before we all move on with our lives, but move on we shall – starting in 2019.

I wish you all a very happy Christmas and peaceful, prosperous new year.