The spirit of Christmas

We were filled with the spirit of Christmas last night when, together with Rick and Justin, we went to the brilliant Christmas At The House concert at the Sydney Opera House. The choir and orchestra of Opera Australia performed carols and other festive songs and we had songsheets to join in with the easy ones that didn't require six years' training at the Conservatorium of Music. Rick and Justin loved it but were rendered gobsmacked when the crowd seemed to respond most enthusiastically to a rendition of the Rolf Harris 'hit' song Six White Boomers (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=hlSsffF2xhA) which tells the story of Santa's sleigh being pulled by six old kangaroos. Good grief. We spent the interval on the opera house deck sipping champagne and watching a cruise ship glide away into the night. Driving home at about 10.30pm, we had an encounter that convinced us of the existence of fate. We were driving along the busy motorway and as we reached a point where our two lanes met another two, we saw a young, smartly dressed bloke staggering along in the middle of the road, as drunk as a lord. It was terrifying to watch. Cars were zooming passed, blowing their horns at him and on he walked. We managed to stop on a sort of hard shoulder in the middle of the two motorways and yelled at him to climb into the back of our car, with me wrestling the kid's car seats out of the way to make room for him. He was so drunk and didn't seem to realise he was on the motorway at all, slurring something about how hard it was to get a taxi. In between repeatedly reminding him NOT to be sick in our car, we asked him where he lived and were astonished when he replied, 'Ashfield'. Of all of the hundreds of suburbs in Sydney he lived in ours, in fact only about 300 metres from our house. I found this amazing. Destiny? It makes me shudder to think that if we had driven passed a few minutes later we might have been stuck behind an ambulance scraping him off the road. Before Rob eventually woke him and poured him from our car to his door, he told us his name was Cyril and that he was 22. So that's our Christmas good deed for the season ticked off. Merry Christmas Cyril.