Roads to Joy

Choirs all around the area are presenting their seasonal programs, often in a participative setting, where carols are enjoined and rafters rattled with enthusiasm. It was a busy weekend for the Cairn Chorus, here in the GlenKens, for example, and some members of that group even found time to sing in a traditional Carols by Candlelight service yesterday evening.

But to get the new week started, a group of older men will be chatting over coffee in the cosier lower room of the renovated New Galloway Town Hall, and riffing along as the spirit takes us. It might be a rather sombre mood this morning, but I’m sure there will be moments of light.

I might raise the topic of the anticipated installation of the bell striking mechanism, high up in the tower, which a couple of us are due to try to accomplish tomorrow afternoon. Or maybe I’ll be more circumspect, not wishing to prejudice our effort, that might after all come to naught. I might enquire if anyone in the little group has ever come across a water safety feature associated with domestic dishwashers, as I had cause to fail in my effort yesterday to help out with an unworking machine.

We might rail against the endless ‘safety devices’ we’re now surrounded with, which are all very well but when they themselves fail can be quite a nuisance. I think that’s what was going on with the recalcitrant dishwasher. Talk about grumpy old men, but there’s always humour associated with the griping.

So we’ll sip our coffee and spend a convivial hour pondering the larger issues of life while we spin tales of success and failure on a smaller scale. I think men, maybe especially older men, are pretty good at this sort of displacement. The deep thoughts are there, but we leaven them with wit and ripostes, riffs in other words, that go around the circle and come back again.

I might, in an offhand sort of way, bewail the Tai Chi evening session, which I’ve been attending in an attempt to work on my own balance issues, but which is cancelled today because the teacher is poorly himself. Covid is still all around us, to say nothing of your average cold. In the weekly sessions, we’ve been trying to emulate the form depicted in this clip from the winners of a competition, the Tai Chi Chuan World Cup. Of course, between the exercise of scampering up ladders to work on the bell tower clock, and gliding around with the broom on the smooth, polished floor of the upper hall, or even setting out the staging for this coming weekend’s SongWave concert, some of us should be having sufficient exercise, anyway.

But in the meantime, we need to engage in a bit of sociable interaction, just to remind ourselves that we live together, that we’re not isolated and alone, not really. And that’s a good sort of joy to be getting on with, to start the week.