THOUGHTS AS THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS GO UP


 Coloured lights and candlelight are minor additions to any room, add a little tinsel and the room is transformed into a grotto. The celebration of light and of bright and shiny things speaks to something very deep in the psyche, something primitive even atavistic.  We feel a thrill as the light plays with shadows, glinting off tinsel, sometimes quivering, hit by a sudden draft, sometimes standing erect as guards outside the Winter Palace. Christmas is many things and long before it was subsumed into Christianity a mid-winter festival was a time to keep the gloom at bay with fire and dancing and chanting. Despite all the accumulated Christian symbolism Christmas still speaks to our pagan spirit.

This year the darkness has felt more oppressive, beginning and ending as it has with mass murder in Paris. A year characterised by slaughter, and, when it came to the nature of the threat we face, by denial, deceit and dissembling. The bodies of the dead in the offices of Charlie Hebbdo were barely cold before the victim blaming began, the calls for more censorship rang out, and the ‘it’s all our fault’ merchants, peddling masochism for the benefit of sadists, filled Twitter timelines and the comment sections of the Guardian and Independent.

This denial of hard facts, of cold sharp reality was most starkly exposed by the reaction of Labour Party members to the disastrous defeat in May. The election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party makes the appointment of Caligula’s horse to the Senate seem like sound political judgement. The result being that we are now de-facto living in a one party state. That this party is the ideologically driven Conservatives who want to dismantle the last remaining social democratic legacy of the Atlee government, also attacking the BBC, with its public service ethos, for good measure, is a catastrophe for this country. Barring miracles, the Conservatives have at least ten years, probably fifteen in which to re-shape the country in their own image. Indeed, we may never again see a viable social democratic alternative to the right again.
 The UK is unlikely to stand the strain. Scotland, already semi-detached will break away. Wales will rightly want to become free of the great Tory experiment and seek every greater levels of autonomy. As for England we will have a state characterised by public squalor and, for those fortunate enough to be the favoured, private wealth.  

Perhaps this is all too pessimistic perhaps I am calling it all wrong, for I do not have the certainties of the Corbynites. So light candles, put up the fairy lights, bedeck the tree and, for those that still can, indulge in a wild bacchanalia[1], for after all:- 

‘Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen:  may it happen for you.’

‘Sometimes’ - Sheenagh Pugh
Compliments of the Season
AT December 2015




[1] Though do remember the less fortunate, remember there is no iron law that says you will never join them. 

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