What’s on

Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many adult, I would do 5 minutes of deep moles and not breathing on her doorstep to prepare for enough guitars the verbal karate. She would greet me with a warm, “And you are?”. Mind you, Mum wasn’t always such a softy. And she was

In the scarred wake of the mud-slide that right about the beard). was 2020, a last-gasp flowering of That notwithstanding, the landmark shiftoptimism. Finally, something good this in American history matches a personalway comes as the valiant men and women acknowledgement this month of what weof pharmaceutical research appear once archly refer to as A Milestone Birthday.again about to rescue a humbled world This sounds positively Jurassic, but it waswith a vaccine. The wrenching TV footage Dwight Eisenhower in the Oval Officethroughout the year of medical staff, often when I was born. The precise mid-point ofinsufficiently gowned and masked, the 1950s arrived when I was twelve daysexposing themselves to horrifying risks to old, the UK’s highest selling record wascare for others will not be soon forgotten. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”. I Vladimir Lenin famously wrote that, know! You could buy a bushel of “There are decades where nothing gobstoppers from Cratchett’s happens; and there are weeks where Confectionary Emporium and still have decades happen”. change from a groat. With jaw-dropping news stories seeming to accelerate with each passing month, 2020 redefined tumultuous. So, as we stagger into 2021 like a retreating army, pummelled and mourning terrible losses, we can nonetheless glimpse respite and recovery Good times. Truthfully, I’m delighted to reach 65 since getting older is a privilege cruelly denied so many. Plus, there have been dodgy moments: I Most recently, of taunted disaster in course, across the Atlantic there was a college after partaking of a medicinal change of management which meant I was sherry before racing around Bangor city up all night watching the TV coverage, a centre on the roof of my own car. Someone lifelong compulsion. As an opinionated else’s ham-fisted wiring once connected (read bolshie) teenager, my mother me to the National Grid for longer than is regularly warned me, “one day you’ll have advisable; I ploughed through a year of my a beard and be arrested in Trafalgar turbulent 30s on a strict diet of cigarettes Square, protesting about something”. (In and ultra-strong coffee, (during which I my own defence, ‘prickly’ doesn’t begin to forgot how to blink and experienced describe my late mother. Visiting her as an palpitations you could hear across the street). On two occasions, as I recalled here recently, somebody has threatened to shoot me. Hence, I am absurdly fortunate. My son and daughter are strong, principled and kind, with adorable – of course - children of their own; my brother is the funniest guy on WhatsApp; I am married to my best friend. Life – predictable, it ain’t. (Also, I’m Sagittarius, we don’t believe in astrology). So, as we stagger into 2021 like a retreating army, pummelled and mourning terrible losses, we can nonetheless glimpse respite and recovery. Meanwhile, “Les gestes barrières” slow the enemy’s advance and reinforce the pertinent French expression, “reculer pour mieux sauter” (broadly, to step back in order to better advance). And advance we will, albeit into a changed world. Quite how it will look and how we conduct ourselves within it, are questions impossible now to ignore. But theatres, cinemas, festivals will all somehow tiptoe back into life. Families will reconvene, planes will fly and friends will gather once again. A Christmas like no other, certainly, but utopian dreams must persist. Societies will surely adjust and reassess with new priorities and values emerging from the crucible of 2020. Who knows, there might even come a day when political figures have to resign when caught telling barefaced lies. We can but dream. Sorry, that was uncalled for. Forgive my jaundiced eye. It’s probably my age.