His seasonal message still moves me to tears
On Tuesday, a Christmas miracle. Not only did my niece, nephew and I all test negative for Covid, so did the cast of the Old Vic’s production of A Christmas Carol. After days of uncertainty, our longed-for outing was on.
I warned Edith and William in advance that I would probably cry and so it came to pass. I wept copiously, while they rolled their eyes. In the interval, I tried to explain that because Dickens’s story has to do with regret – with choices wrongly made and paths never taken – its wondrous power only grows as you get older. What I didn’t tell them, wanting (probably naively) to preserve their innocence, is that its central message could at this point hardly be more necessary or less likely to be heeded.
