New Year's Eve

Surely it is a generally known fact that Unity Folk Club happens on the last Monday of the month; unless this is Christmas day. So last year (yes. I mean 2018; and yes, I typed "this year" and had to correct myself) it fell on New Year's Eve – as it must do, I suppose, every seven years on average, though not every seventh year. Please do not tell me how to work out the pattern of its recurrence, I prefer the mystery.

Get some people together in a room, seat them in a circle, start singing: this is probably the closest thing I have to a religious observance. We are less strict than Judaism with its minyan; just before eight o'clock there are five of us; enough people have sent apologies that I don't expect many more, so Girlbear and I start the evening by singing “Pleasant and Delightful” - this is an evening for old chestnuts, if ever there was one.

Soon CG is singing his song about Lazarus; does he save this for New Year's Eve? In any case, it is hallowed by familiarity and by singing, and we are all joining in the chorus with its “skinny-malinky-doolium”, a useful phrase that rhymes with everything. Dives has been dragged off to hellium, which the devil tells him “ain't no rich hotellium”; Lazarus has ascended to Heav'nium, to seat himself “on the starboard side of Abraham”. The magic kicks in; I am again/have always been in this room, singing these songs with these people..

..for the room is filling up: I am reminded of a review which described the orchestra as “creeping in one at a time, like latecomers at a Greg Lake concert". We no longer have to worry whether we will be able to eat all the food that people have brought. Familiar faces, and even a couple of first-timers, bemused by the space they find themselves in. The Torriano Meeting House is currently sporting an exhibition of drawings, and hanging mobiles cut from orange peel, warped by drying, and warped again in being seen most easily by their shadows.

JK hasn't been with us for years, having moved to Kent; he starts a theme of mild melancholy, and thoughts of absent friends, by singing “Unicorns”, by the late Bill Caddick. My own melancholia is prodded when someone mentions the Hampshire Chess League – he hadn't played in it, but was tickled that it stretched as far as Salisbury. If he had played in it, he might well have been matched against my father, so on the next time around, Girlbear and I play the instrumental arrangement of “Dance to thy Daddy” that we had put together for his wake. The Hexamshire Lass is delighted, though indeed we are not short of northern Material – MK has played a fiddle tune called “Bottle Bank”, which has little to do with recycling, being the name of a street in Gateshead.

LL sings a song in Ladino (a mixture of Spanish and Hebrew). He tells us that it has no chorus, and I tease him that this saves him the disappointment of our not being able to pick it up. But his next song is also in Ladino, and does have a chorus; he must have sung it here before, because soon we are joining in.

Now that we are a large enough crowd to deal with the food, I might worry that the single bottle of Prosecco we have brought (raffle loot) might not go round; but the Hexhamshire lass has trumped this with a bottle of Sri Lankan coconut flower whisky.. "Auld Lang Syne" is sung; we stand in a circle and disagree over when you should join hands.. a final song - "Thousands or More", of course - and it is time to tidy up and go home. A joyous New Year to you all, and may 2019 improve upon 2018.

[A footnote – my spellchecker tells me “skinny-malinky-doolium” should be "policy-making".]