There used to be mice in our house.
Sitting at the kitchen table late in the evening I would occasionally see them scurrying across the floor and then disappearing through impossibly small gaps in the skirting. Once, they went into my bag and ate some chocolate. But mostly they kept themselves to themselves and stayed out of the food, so I left them alone.
And then, one morning, I found one, dead beside the fridge, as if he’d just gotten tired and stopped for a rest, and then given up entirely. It was rather sad, and the more so because since then I haven’t seen or heard the skittering of a single rodent, so I’ve come to realise that we didn’t have mice at all. We had a mouse. The mouse who gave up was the mouse left behind. It must have been a very lonely existence.
Loneliness, even on this fabulously crowded, colourful, diverse little bunch of islands is something we all encounter, something most of us feel at one time or another. The weekend can be the worst, from Friends-Round-Friday to Sunday brunch when everyone else seems to be getting the love.
Sometimes loneliness is weirdly public. To be a judge is to be lonely, as Shirley surely knows. To have to fill the sixteen bars of a guitar solo, Dr May, is painfully exposed and lonely. To step out to perform your own songs is to be alone no matter how big the audience, James.
Sometimes, though, like the mouse, it’s hard to tell when someone is lonely.
In the Bible, even David, the anointed King and popular hero who fought Goliath, the boy least-likely-to-be-lonely, begged God, “Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.”
To be turned to, to be noticed, to have someone be gracious to you: I reckon that what David cried out for is at the heart of the connection that we all need. I need it.
And in that there’s a glimmer of hope, a hint at how things might be better. Because to turn to someone, to be gracious to them, to smile and say hello is within anyone’s compass. And when we do it, we break the isolation of loneliness whether we see it or not. And then no mouse is left behind.
This was a strange Friday show, with Brian May, Shirley Ballas and James Blunt (see above).
The atmosphere took a bit of a hit when Zoe Ball asked Brian May whether Queen might ever play Glastonbury and he rather solemnly told her that it was out of the question because Michael Eavis supported the badger cull. Added to that, I told the story of how I’d heard an early James Blunt demo used as the soundtrack for a puppet show by Miriam and her friend Leila. He didn’t find it terribly amusing. Awkward.