I would like to believe in angels on our rooftops . . .

. . . because this darkness of midwinter could not possibly be all that there is. Could it?

IN THE BLEAK midwinter we sit by the fire – me and the General. I daydream and wonder why we have remained friends over the years. And if the secret police knocked on the door would we cling to each other, in loyalty, or endure death camps together, because of love? Because we all like to think of ourselves as heroes. We would all like to play Schindler in Schindler's List. Not that another rash of Nazi madness is imminent, but you never know. And if democracy is eroded in some new Europe it will be our children that may suffer.

The fire blazes, and I continue to daydream. Perhaps our children will live in houses where open fires are illegal.

Perhaps the image of Santa sitting at the fireside will be airbrushed away, just like the crib has been erased from all our Christmas cards.

Perhaps a brave new world is coming where people will finally accept that life ends in the grave and that heaven is a poppycock of the unconscious mind. Where human depression can be understood as death anxiety.

Perhaps the next generation will concoct a world where belief in the child of Bethlehem is seen as the crude remnant of a medieval imagination, unsustainable in a secular, sophisticated Europe of rational human beings. But I doubt it.

These thoughts exhaust me and the General in his armchair seems equally debilitated. We are both numb, because the blandness of a happy Christmas creates a vacuum in the heart, just like anti-depressants create a toxic emptiness where no emotion can survive.

It’s a long time since I stayed up all night in the chapel in Maynooth, getting high on incense and whispered prayers, as I abandoned myself into the arms of Jesus, hour after hour, before the white altar, during an all-night vigil for peace on the week before Christmas.

All the hymns were strong anthems of masculinity, and the sleeping boys around me looked like cherubs, fresh skinned and almond eyed, though I’m not sure how many of them ever found peace.

I suppose a lot of them are grey-haired clerics now, with pin-cushioned noses or trembling hands, alone in the stone-cold kitchens of crumbling presbyteries. Some probably became bishops. Others are in the grave.

Some are in prison or, perhaps in disgrace, banished to the misery of far-flung urban anonymity, from whence even Schindler would not want to rescue them.

And the General ages. He that was mighty – and once walked into any room with an arched back and a smile that said, “Pay attention to me, ladies!” – has no colour left in his face except the greyness of a watery twilight, as he stares across the flickering room at me, wondering if the woman who jilted him during the year might have been the last love of his life. Or is there more?

“There’s always more,” I say. The General’s phone rings and, though dozing by the fire, he bounces into life, becoming airborne as he reaches for the mobile on the mantelpiece. It could be her. It could be her. But it’s not.

So we fall back into reverie, and I daydream of a white Christmas, and the sun coming in through the glass of a hall door, as it used to when I was a child.

I daydream of a white scarf some carol singer left abandoned on a barstool years ago, and I can still recall the scent of it, and suddenly the General announces that a man he knows hanged himself during the week.

“In his own house,” the General says. “His father found him and had to hold the boy aloft, but couldn’t get him undone from the rope; he stood there in the hallway, propping up the unconscious boy so that his neck would not break, while he phoned the ambulance on his mobile.

“Imagine,” says the General, “in the hallway of a house he couldn’t pay the mortgage on.” I hear noises on the roof.

“What was that?” the General wonders.

“Angels,” I suggest. Because I would still like to believe in angels, above the rooftops in the dark, and because this darkness of midwinter could not possibly be all that there is. Could it?

The following morning I scoop ashes from the fire grate and hear crows cackling in the chimney, as if they had heard us the previous night, and were still laughing.