Table for one for Christmas, but there will be good cheer.

It's a table for one again this Christmas. Yet even in solitude, I follow the customs of Christmas taught to me in sunnier times. There will be food, drink and music for the occasion.

"Be of good cheer," I tell myself. But like the Xmas decorations on my tree- joy is a little worse for wear after these five solitary yuletide years. It's a going-through-the-motions feeling to everything I do during this holiday season. Creeping dread and lingering despondency now skulk on the backstairs of my personality. It's a weariness at the normality of living in dark times as if it was always so. It's the frustration of not knowing whether people aren't aware of the maddening cruelty of this moment in history or are simply ignoring it hoping nothing bad happens to them.

Neoliberalism got the best of me this year. I can't shake this sense that everything will get far worse and not better during what's left to my dance to the music of time.

Everything that makes life decent for the ordinary person is in crisis. Affordable housing has been eliminated. Our climate is bleeding out from the abuses of capitalism. Public healthcare was deliberately destroyed during the COVID pandemic and now is picked apart by hedge funds the way road kill is feasted upon by crows.

We have had too much war this year and too much anguish. So much of the death made over these last 365 days was created not because ordinary people are violent or greedy but because the 1% is. I have an overwhelming feeling that the genocide in Gaza, like the war in Ukraine or Sudan, is a prelude to our own Götterdämmerung.

My festive exile is a choice made for me by reasons of health more than poverty, although being piss poor does influence what I do. I have invitations to attend Christmas dinners but won't go.

COVID isn't over for people, like me who because of comorbidities have a target painted on their back by a virus that attacks all manner of human organs. I can't risk getting seriously ill or mildly ill in a society that has no social safety nets to catch me should I be unable to care for myself. I've already done that rodeo when I was diagnosed with rectal cancer in 2020 at the exact moment COVID hit our world with the ferocity of a Category 5 hurricane making landfall.

When my dad died in November 2018, I was gutted over that Christmas season. I spent Christmas Day delivering food parcels for those less fortunate than me. I wanted to be out of the house and bury my grief in work. Still, there was a deadness in my heart, and I felt sad and separated from other living beings. I remember that after I had finished my turkey dinner deliveries, I went home to an empty apartment and drank a glass of wine. I felt purposeless and unconnected to life because my dad's death was still very fresh in my heart. I even wrote a letter to myself permitting me to end my life in a year should my despair continue.

A year after I wrote that letter, I laughed about it because I knew although it hadn't been formally diagnosed- I had cancer. I realised that life was going to do what it wanted with me. So I may as well hang on until the ride was over to see if it was all worth it. In the interim, cancer and I have called it a draw for now because a progressive lung disease is fighting it out to be the one to assassinate me. Hopefully, it will take its sweet time to finish the job.

I'm in this life until my last breath. Until then, I will be both of good cheer and resolve that I am on this earth to find moments of happiness. But also fight for a democracy- which is for the many rather than the few.

There is no mandatory rule that statutory holidays will be a happy occasion for you or me. Happiness has its own timetable and can appear in times of peace, war and even plague when the circumstances are right.

Happiness is the most fragile of feelings- that even an unkind whisper can shatter it. But like spring it always comes back.

So, if it is your thing, Happy Christmas and if it isn’t, Happy Holidays because life is still the sweetest ride despite its deadly thorns. We are going into both big and small wars in 2025. So don't be petty with your love and affection to those you care about during this Christmas season.

Go Well, each and every one of you that I have broken bread with on this platform. You have shown me much comradeship during my journey through the valleys that scarred the political and economic landscape of 2024. Take care, John