B's Eve

I'm writing this as I drink a glass of water to reduce the snoring I may produce when I go to bed.

Many people outside of the Black Country won't understand directly, but you'll have your equivalent. We all have our own JB's- our own shitty local nightclub that is frequented, as a ritual, from the age of 16 or earlier. Ours is being closed down next year. The ritual has always been to go down there on Christmas Eve. I've avoided it for many years. I'll be honest; I've reached an age where I saw girls of legal age in skimpy outfits and rather than thinking "Get in there", I thought "She'll catch her death...does her father know she's here?"

JBs is your coming-of-age around here. Scarily, even now there were people I recognised from when I first went. I stopped attending when I started bumping into my own students. It's been about 3 or 4 years since I last went, and 11 since I first attended. It took 1 hour to get in. Disgusting. In the old days we used to neck as many as we could in the Full Moon on the high street (£1 a pint before 9pm), then leg it down to the club (free before 10pm) and dance to the 80s room until 2am. I'd often walk home in the cold and have to force myself to wake up in time for college. They were good(ish) days.

Today I bumped into 2 of my old students: JPB who was a personal favourite and I was glad to see, and JB who was an utter wank. Seeing JPB cheered me up; a success story that I discovered whilst I was left standing on my own, all to "The Fairytale of New York". Upstairs I danced my only public dance of the year to "No Good (Start the dance)" by The Prodigy.

The Christmas spirit emerged at some ungodly hour when I made my own way home. I said goodbye to the friends I left with and could find, then made my way to a taxi. A polite Asian man warned me that it would be double fare and I panicked. On reflection I didn't have enough, so he asked me how much I had and told me he'd take me to my road even though his boss wouldn't like it. He said it was because I was honest. He could tell, apparently. He told me that God would repay him because no act of kindness goes unrewarded. As an atheist, I agreed somewhat by saying that Christmas draws people together and he would undoubtedly get something in return.

On the walk home from the drop off (the bottom of Gorsty Hill- a place with the most Black Country name ever, just in case you need a hint of the beautiful language we have around here) the birds were singing. It was before 3am and already the air was as crisp as a spring day. Normally I'd stick on my I-pod and trudge home, but this night was spent in all of nature. And that made me think- this is God's land. I don't mean that in any religious sense because I'm not a believer at all. But look at the world. What is it we're meant to see in Eden and in the world created by the Lord? It's the sound of birds in the silence of a still night. It's owls and foxes running through their lives. It's the simple breeze on our skin. I had that in a single walk down a road at 2.30 on a Christmas Morning. We don't need salvation. We just need to look around and see the goodness that isn't inherent in every man, but is part of what he is capable of.

Dare I say, it's why I love Marx and Zizek and Badiou and even Nietzsche and Sartre, and certainly Camus. In the darkness, we forget the light. And the light is not divine- it is human. It is simple recognition. It is perspective. From one end of the road to the next, it was the finest Christmas moment I have ever had. A miracle without God. Perfection.