This is no Christian evangelical plea whatever-their-shortcomings in impressing ethical behaviour upon us, all the great religions emphasise self denial and set down in ritual and liturgy the requirement for lengthy preparation before the joy of a festival. Thus, I can imagine no deep joy from Christmas without Advent, no joy without Yom Kippur or Ramadan as a precursor.

Between the First and Second Sundays of Advent - perhaps I am a little self indulgent in singing in two succeeding Advent Carol services - Seattle saw more excitement in a single week than Bill Gates has generated nearly in two decades.

There were some unselfish if somewhat confused 'Generation X' protesters, but the bulk of the trouble was made by labour union representatives given unscrupulous support by President Clinton whose Vice President needs their funds for his campaign. There was nothing wrong, of course, in organised labour lobbying in its own self interest, it was the blatant hypocrisy of invoking the protection of India's children that rankled.

There was a tinier demonstration in London which temporarily closed the station to which my train was headed but it didn't matter because unseasonal gales blew down the overhead power wires when I was still 100 miles away. Were greed simply to mock us in our individual gratification - the greedy becoming fat - it would be easier to bear, but we are all choked by automobile fumes and, racked by strangely warm weather, we have all been robbed of our cold and frosty mornings.

For once the WTO fixers were baulked by uncharacteristic determination from the poorer countries. Washington's diplomatic efforts were only successful in preventing Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean from agreeing on a common front, but they could not stop its own agenda being blocked.

Had there been a more reliable 'chief fixer' matters might have gone better, but Mike Moore was, if anything, worse than his detractors predicted during the unedifyingly protracted campaign by the United States to get him elected as President of the WTO against the wishes of most of its Members.

A little more, well, preparation would have been in order but the underlying flaw in the ambitions of the grasper and the bully is that greed is not patient. Until now the poorest countries have calculated that their best interests have lain in more or less going along with the wishes of the world's richest but it is now clear that the idea of genuine world free trade is a sham and that most of the poorest have done so relatively badly since the end of the Uruguay Round that they have nothing to lose from holding out.

I wish them, above all, persistence and patience; I wish them eloquently noncommittal at 3 a.m. when the scribes begin to nod; I wish them politely indifferent as effulgent but nugatory offers of mango canneries are mooted over the canapés; I wish them coldly angry as their cruelty to children is trailed by the richest state in the world which is unwilling, and will soon be unable, to stop a substantial proportion of its infants from becoming incurable drug addicts.

Being childless myself, it is perhaps slightly presumptuous of me to opine, but I suspect I would prefer my son to be making shirts at 20 for a Dollar than to be stealing 20 Dollars for his next hit.

I doubt we will have learned much from the necessary fiasco of Seattle. No doubt we shall sing "Goodwill to all men" whilst being immensely careful where we spread our goodwill; not much of it, I warrant, will go into the collecting boxes for the poor of our own lands and even less the lands far away where many of the gifts we buy and bless with what is left of our good grace were made in conditions of near slavery; but better to be a slave than a master; better to be oppressed than an oppressor; but, best of all is it at this time to enjoy the symbolic if not the literal meaning of Christmas to its very depth rather than simply to reduce it to yet one more shopping festival. Like the poor, the shops will always be with us.

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