8 Lessons and Carols for Godless People
(Slightly pre-emptive) Happy New Year, yous guys.

I'm not really one for resolving things, especially when we've just had Christmas and it's nearly my birthday, but if I were going to have a resolution for 2009, it'd probably just be "More words". I actually did pretty well in 2008 in most regards, not least finishing a draft of a whole actual book, but getting more words written is the most obvious way that 2009 could aim to improve on its predecessor. Trying to keep up the daily blogging thing a bit more consistently would be one way to make that happen, so, I'll see about giving it a shot. Maybe it'll work well and really get me creatively motivated. (I give it a month.)

Let's make a start now. Before Christmas, I went to this show in London, called Eight Lessons and Carols for Godless People. It was inspired by the frustration felt by comedian Robin Ince at a televised debate he attended, titled "Are they Taking The Christ Out of Christmas?", during which a great deal of untrue but entirely typical "War on Christmas" bullshit was spouted, and he didn't really have a chance to adequately respond. Possibly most grating was the inability of Stephen Green (whose organisation's website makes him seem every bit as loathsome as he's been described to me) to accept that there was anything about Christmas that an atheist like Ince could possibly approve of or enjoy. There's a lot that I like about Christmas too, but it's probably less hard to sound convincing when a constant slew of untruths all around you is rendering you incapable of making a cogent argument beyond "Look dickhead, when I see carol singers it makes me FUCKING HAPPY, and the delight on a child's face as they watch a Christmas tree lighting up FILLS MY HEART WITH SHITTING JOY, okay?"

So, he decided to hold a Christmas party, bringing together comedians, musicians, and scientists, to perform comedy routines, songs, and speeches, with a generally secular (if not always profoundly atheistic) leaning. And there was much rejoicing.

It was a great night out. He'd got together an impressive line-up - Ricky Gervais and Richard Dawkins being probably the biggest names on the bill - most of whom also agreed to do more than one night at several different venues when the demand for tickets went through the roof. Stewart Lee still gets my vote for Funniest Man Alive, Tim Minchin is one of very few people I've ever been tempted to describe using the word "man-crush", and Ben Goldacre is the kind of person that phrases like "made of win" were coined for. (Or he would be, in a just world, if they hadn't actually been coined for pictures of cats with bacon stuck to them. (To the cats, not the pictures.))

It is, admittedly, a format that needs some refining. For a start, although it never felt to me like it was dragging, it did last three and a half hours. Even including twenty minutes of interval, I think that's just too long. You could probably make it last for several straight days if you invited everyone with something funny to say (or sing) about Christmas or science or atheism and who's up for putting on a show. Even if everyone on the bill had been an unmissable delight, it would've been worth trimming it down a little. (Not everybody was, in my opinion, but I'm not going to go too deep into subjective assessments here.)

And one thing that might help with this would be if they got a clearer idea of what themes were going to carry them through the evening, and had some sort of consistent thread that everything would connect to. Celebrating science and scientists is definitely a good start (the show was interspersed with quotes from and discussion about Carl Sagan, one of Ince's heroes), and an irreverently irreligious approach is important to remind us that we're not doing the usual Jesus-y thing here - but this seemed a bit sporadic, particularly in the case of the musicians, some of whom seemed to be there more because they were available (and because someone decided there ought to be some kind of musical interlude between any long periods of people just standing there and talking) than because of any relevance they had to the theme. (Not saying they weren't good, just that they sometimes distracted from any scientific or atheistic thread that sometimes got going.)

Personally, I'd be tempted not to let things get too devoutly atheistic, keep it comfortably blasphemous, make it an hour shorter, and maybe throw in a proper sing-along or two, of some actual decent Christmas songs - I don't imagine it'd be worth paying for the rights to use Fairytale of New York, though it's a nice idea, but something to make it a more overtly Christmassy event might help.

But the only reason I seem to have so many paragraphs of critique is that I loved it despite it not being perfect yet, and would love to see it turn into an unmissable holiday tradition in years to come. They certainly seem to be on the right track.

Briefly summarising the rest of the year: Not long after the show, I went back to visit the family for Christmas, which was great, and nobody else turned up for me to have to socialise with, which was even better. And now I'm back, and it's New Year's Eve, which means my one resolution kicks in, in about four hours' time. Since writing the first paragraph of this particular overlong piece of blather, I've decided on my only resolution for 2009 being "More words than last year", and to that end, I've added a layer of accountability by getting myself one of them there Twitter accounts. I'm yet to completely figure out how it works, but my username is writerJames, which I think means that if you go here you can start following me. The plan is to tweet daily updates about how much I've written, and anyone is encouraged to become a follower and poke me if it doesn't look like I'm working hard enough. I like the idea of having followers. They're practically minions, really.

Anyway, that's quite enough for this year. 2009's not far off. Good luck, everyone.