The Politics of Dancing

  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...