John Lewis has released its festive advert: a boy in love with a Venus flytrap plant

THE victims of a Venus flytrap plant seal their own miserable deaths when they struggle, as each wrestle signals to the beast that there is something stuck and the clasps tighten.

The cracks of light disappear and you – a fly – get covered in enzymes which reduce you to a husk. What a way to go, this process of being evacuated can take up to five days.

And yet, even this might seem preferable to sitting through years of John Lewis festive adverts, the release of which is heralded as a national event no matter how repetitive the formula.

The store has acquired an unlimited supply of little boys in perfect pyjamas, all ready to make a friend out of something unsuitable to spend Christmas with.

The boy’s suitably horrified mother in the advert

Unveiled yesterday (Thursday), this year it isn’t a penguin or a cute dragon, but a Venus flytrap which is far too boisterous for the front room. But what do you know? It’s perfect for that otherwise arduous task of unwrapping presents on a frosty Christmas morning.

If only we were more accepting is the message for the two- thousandth time – we’re not all perfectly formed, but our differences are something to be celebrated at this special time of year in the only way we know how: buying perfume, expensive headphones and all the warm cuddly turtle-neck jumpers and boots a Warwick Avenue mum could ask for.

You do realise this will never end? Unable to think of new ideas, the department store will keep ploughing millions of pounds into these adverts, presumably with the full chinny reckon consent of its workforce known as “partners”.

And so our poor nation remains in the flytrap, a country run by a clockwork diet of Strictly, The Apprentice, PJ and Duncan, the John Lewis ad, the moaning about the John Lewis ad and so on. The same thing every year.

You can, of course, generate your own John Lewis ad by taking your middle name and your favourite animal, and something you like about Christmas: Mine is Xavier the Giraffe, a bit of a pain because he does big turds on the front lawn but, hey, he is the only one who can reach high enough to string the festive lights up along Brighton seafront. Everybody cheers as he does it.

Or maybe it could be Ramona the Rhino smashing through all the cherry vape shops on Oxford Street, so John Lewis isn’t the only place on the “nation’s high street” worth going in. Add in twinkletoes piano and a sad child becoming a happy child, and that’s job done. Still, wouldn’t it be better if these things were like the World Cup or the Olympics.

Once every four years would be enough for me.