蜜芽传媒

Good morning. New Year鈥檚 Eve is a strange time. Many tonight will be with family or friends toasting in the New Year; the young perhaps out partying or splashing about in some fountain in a City Square. But for others it鈥檚 a more sombre time. One of these was the great Samuel Johnson. Johnson is known best from the powerful impression he made on his 18th century contemporaries like James Boswell and Mrs Thrale and his many published writings. But what is so interesting is that we also have access to him through his diaries and prayers. We know him from the inside, his most private thoughts; and we learn from these that New Year鈥檚 eve was not an easy time for him. Indeed he used to wrestle with his feelings until 2 or later in the morning trying to sum up how he felt in prayers, which he wrote down. These begin with a sense of surprise and gratitude that he had survived another year, but then they are full of regrets about the past. Although a man of prodigious energy and accomplishment he wondered what he had really achieved and most poignant of all were his fears about the future. 鈥淐ompose the disorders of my mind鈥�, he prayed, 鈥淒ispel my terrors鈥�. Yet he always ended with some firm resolve, 鈥淟et me perform for thy glory and the good of my fellow creatures, the work which thou shalt yet appoint me.鈥�

Sadly, 2014 was not a good year for the world. Like Dr Johnson we may be feeling in a sombre mood. The memory of the terrible massacre of schoolchildren in Peshawar is still very much with us. There are now more refugees in the world than there were at the end of World War II. Then of course there is the Ebola epidemic, continuing concern about climate volatility, and the generally depressed state of the world economy. Not much cheer, indeed it is easy to get depressed. That鈥檚 why at a time like this I go back to a memorial on the little church of Staunton Harold in Leicestershire. The church was built in 1653, in the midst of the civil war, in defiance of Thomas Cromwell. The memorial to the builder Sir Robert Shirley reads 鈥渨hose singular praise it is to have done the best things in the worst times and hoped them in the most calamitous.鈥�

As we welcome in the New Year we will wish each other a good 2015 and the world a better one than 2014. We will try to be hopeful but whether or not that is what we are really feeling, what better memorial could there be for any of us than those words, that we did the best things in the worst times and hoped them in the most calamitous.