Watching my grandson in his Christmas play helped lift my frosty mood - Ian McMillan

I can’t pinpoint the fountainhead of the grumpiness but I think it had a quite a lot to do with the cold dark winter mornings and the cold dark winter nights and, metaphorically, the feeling that a kind of cold darkness was settling over the world, that we were rolling into a tunnel that it might take a long time emerge from.

Somewhere within my non-specific grumpiness, however, a feeling was nestling: the feeling that everything would be a lot better once I’d been to see a junior school Christmas show, especially one with Noah playing Joseph, and so it proved.

As I took my seat on one of those tiny Key Stage One chairs next to my wife I thought back to the Christmas shows I’d been involved with at Low Valley Juniors in Darfield, way back in the early 1960’s.

In one of them I’d been chosen to be a Wise Man and I’d made my own hat, which was a startling construction of gravity-defying cardboard and crepe paper that looked from certain angles like The Leaning Tower of Pisa and from other angles like a quiff that had been defeated in battle.

I found that I had to hold my head very still to stop the hat succumbing to the demands of gravity and falling to the school hall floor and this, combined with fierce hat-concentration, mean that I embarrassingly forgot my words in the song.

I was Balthazar and I had to sing ‘Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume brings a life of gathering gloom’ whilst holding a Fairy Liquid bottle with a sticker on that said, in a way that I thought was mildly amusing, MY MYRRH.

In the song, when it was my turn and the audience were all looking at me, I sang ‘Myrrh is mine’ and then I dried up and I froze and I blanked. There were words to the song floating around somewhere in the universe but for the life of me I couldn’t catch them.

They carried on floating, unsung for what must have been less that a minute but which felt like a week and a half.

The audience gazed at me, impassive as figures in a stained glass window; they’d been to school plays before and they knew the score.

They knew that just had to sit and wait. I glanced at Mrs Hinchliffe through my tears. She smiled and said ‘Try again Ian, and I’ll tell you what: take your hat off.’ And I took my hat off, tried again, and the words tumbled out speedily but in the right order and more or less in the right key.

Noah had learned his words and he said them in a voice that was loud and clear. The singing was catchy and inviting and the costumes made us all smile.

I thought of the way I’d taken my hat off all those years ago and I felt I was taking my grumpiness off in the same way. At the end I clapped fit to bust and I caught Noah’s eye (I was under strict instructions not to wave) and gave him the thumbs up.

Merry Christmas, everybody. We all usually remember the words in the end. Savour that optimism!