Carol King

Missus O and I attended our first carol concert of the year last night.  Our residents' association set the whole thing up, and despite the light drizzle, it was very jolly and very festive.  I do like a carol concert, but it's particularly pleasing to yodel glad yuletide tidings with your friends and neighbours in attendance.  Life-affirming stuff.

We've another one in the diary for next week, a traditional service of nine lessons and carols at St.Stephen Walbrook, a Wren church in the City of London.  That one is our annual curtain-raiser proper to the festive period.  The vicar of said church is a very, very jolly man, generous of spirit and warm of welcome - just what a proper Christian should be.  I believe he retires this year; he'll be missed.

Sadly, this year I've begun my customary bout of maudlin Xmas-introspection early.  It's a tiresome ritual, this.  I sift through the smouldering wreckage of my achievements, silently weeping in nostalgia for a past that never existed.  It's as much fun as it sounds.  Drinking doesn't help of course, but getting through advent without drinking would be like treading grapes on stilts: infuriating, protracted and absolutely pointless.

I'm having a mid-life crisis I think.  It's tough.  I'm not depressed, just bored, which is actually worse.  The only upside to this is that if the name of the condition is to be taken seriously, I should live to the ripe old age of 92.  Bingo!  It reminds one of that joke Woody Allen tells at the beginning of "Annie Hall" - "Well, that's essentially how I feel about life.  Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly." 

I may bemoan life at times, but it's better than the alternative - that I do know.  Clive James gave the lie the romantic notions that surround the youthful death wish when he was given a terminal leukemia diagnosis.  He noted that all thoughts of self-immolation and nihilistic grand gestures that he used to have as a younger man fell by the wayside.  He started to concentrate on the what he had.  A bird in the hand...

Yes, that's the stuff!  Thanks, Clive.  I should remember this lesson when I'm down in dees next - read the words of a funny, intelligent wordsmith.  That's life-affirmation.  A defibrillator for the spirit.