BEER AND CAROLS 6

It’s fair to say that I’ve not done as much carolling as in previous years. No outdoor-Winchester this time (I’m assuming that dropping my music in the mud mid-Calypso-Carol last year was enough to avoid the nod this time). Also, I suspect that a few places have found more local piano players to step up to the keyboard. That’s great!

One fixture though, that has been in the diary for a long long time, is the annual Beer and Carols event, a good opportunity for a church not too far away to do something fun in their local social club. Tonight was my sixth outing, playing carols on the piano for them.

There’s so much to say about the social club culture! It’s probably the closest thing to experiencing church as a newcomer that I’ll ever have without actually being in one: confusing rules of engagement, all the generations there from the very young to the very senior, everyone seems to know everyone, and they all throw around the inside jokes about each other; some are very quiet, some are clearly ‘characters’, the PA system sounds like it’s been overdriven every week since 1997, and there are cliques of people sitting together... everywhere! As a yearly visitor, I feel strangely out-of-place in the middle of all of that familiarity, despite a group of people who very clearly wanted to be together and considered each other as family. It made me think a lot.

Of course unlike church, this community flocks around the trinity of the bar, the pool table, and the big screen TV. As we kicked off the hearty old carols with a blast of Once in Royal David’s City, I glanced over my shoulder to see Sky Sports coverage of the bright green pitch at Molineux, where in the strangest juxtaposition, Wolverhampton Wanderers were playing Liverpool in the Premier League.

“Mary was, that mother mild,” I sang. The ball went out for a throw in, “Jesus Christ, her little child.”

They appreciated the sing-song. I was slightly disappointed that Mr Ding-Dong-Merrily-On-High-The-Holly-Bells-Are-Ringing wasn’t there to repeat his famous line over that particular carol. There was some gusto in the glorias though, and a huge cheer went up, right after the final triumphant ‘Hosanna in Excelsis!’ Though I think that was mostly for Liverpool, who had just gone one nil up.

If you’ve read about Beer and Carols from me before, you’ll also know of course, that no such evening goes by without the customary raffle. Sure enough, out it came.

There were two tonight: a meat raffle, and then a general Christmas one, featuring bottles of Prosecco, and other gifts donated by local businesses.

And they took forever. Personally, I think the rules are a little complicated: you buy your line of tickets from the bar, they record your name next to your number-range instead of giving you a raffle ticket. Then the rafflemaster (it’s too grand but I can’t think what else to call him) pushes his fancy randomator (also too grand, but imagine a foot-long digital alarm clock display which generates four digit numbers at random) and then calls out the number, one digit at a time.

“Three... five... four... one! That’s three, five, four, one, everybody. Three five four one: three-five... four...one. Anybody got threefivefourone? Anyone at all?”

Have you won? Nobody knows. The bar will tell you, but they’re busy serving drinks so they’ve printed out the rows and names and given it to someone to check. I couldn’t help but think the traditional system might have been faster. But I am an annual nobody, right on the fringes of this community. That made me think a lot too.

In the end, ‘Chunky’ won the grand prize (two hundred n fifty ‘pand’), the rafflemaster was genuinely gutted that he didn’t, and someone else went home with a lot of meat.

Not me. I stopped off at the Asda garage and picked up some milk and some eggs, happy that once again I’d been able to be part of something very different, singing about hope and light in dark places, and having my cultural lenses shifted a bit by stepping into an unfamiliar culture. Seems Christmassy to me, any road.

Oh and Liverpool won as well, which I’m sure helped with the atmosphere. Though... I’m not sure why... Liverpool is 200 miles away! Maybe I’ll stick to understanding Christmas and carolling.