‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse’

The Night Before Christmas By Samuel Clemens

In the library at my primary school, there was a book which contained just this poem – a verse per page, gloriously illustrated.   I was enchanted, and learned the poem by heart.  I don’t say I can quite remember it all still, but a fair chunk still remains. I love the opening couplet and its suppressed moment of stillness and waiting; as I’ve said before, I gain much pleasure from looking forward to things, sometimes as much or more than the event itself.

Anticipation is a lovely feeling.  Anti meaning before, capare meaning to take.  Literally, says an etymological dictionary, ‘taking into possession beforehand’.  It’s having your cake, before you eat it.

We’ve each been navigating our way through the last few months, with our singular concerns, problems, fears, and (I hope) consolations and therapies.  The essential things which we’ve missed have been commonly felt:  hugs, being able to be with the ones we love the most, any sense of being in control or able to plan.  But as soon as the first few levels of the, as it were, Maslow-Covid pyramid of needs has been achieved, glorious incomprehending individualistic diversity returns.  We’ve been missing, and looking forward to, such different things.  As levels of restrictions are relaxed, it’s impossible not to wonder if there is someone for whom this strange grouping of ‘things you can now do’ is exactly what they have longed for  – ‘Yes!! I’ve been waiting to get my eyebrows threaded and visit a casino before I go to skating.  For me, the lockdown is over’.

For me, increasingly, and of course, it’s going to the theatre.  This is so tediously ‘not a surprise’ to anyone who knows me and yet I still feel caught out, that jolt that comes at the foot of the stairs when there is one more, unremembered step.   No matter how much we think we know ourselves, we still don’t quite believe we are this predictable;   I don’t know if this is due to a lack of self-knowledge or a frustrated hope that I may still yet surprise myself.

And now I anticipate going back into a theatre. If I pause, and imagine the moment, the very thought makes me catch my breath and could easily render me a little tearful.  It makes no sense, no sense at all.

The possibility caught me by surprise:  the Bridge Theatre (of course) announcing a season of one-person plays, swiftly, soon.  Serendipitously piling pleasure upon pleasure, this was just in time for me to attend on my birthday.  I’m ambivalent about birthdays; they are bitter-sweet markers, Janus moments as one looks back and forth.  What have I done with this time? How much time is left? How, if I were to stand back and look, would I give account of myself?  And if that’s all too difficult then what, after this strange lock down stasis, is the thing that declares and affirms the kind of person I am?

I am someone who goes to the theatre.