Explosions of knees and joy at a family wedding!

Right now I am filled with joy. This evening I attended my lovely niece’s wedding in a forest somewhere north of Tel Aviv. Instead of the usual allocation of numbers, the tables at the dinner were given names. We sat a table called Joy.

We humans can’t help noticing and feeling all our negative emotions. They hit our heads and hearts with the clout and ferocity of a baseball bat. Yet often we fail to appreciate the second, minute or day in which there’s not only an absence of problems, but also a bursting rush of pleasure in the soul.

Over the decades I’ve learned to spot happy times when they happen. I wrap them up and store them away in my brainbox. Often they’ve faded before you can appreciate them and that’s a wasted opportunity to revel and glow.

Joy, however, is a rare and powerful positive emotion that proves impossible to ignore.

Tonight I experienced joy: a feeling impressing its presence upon me like a longed-for kiss from a loved one.

Tonight I was surrounded by hundreds of others experiencing joy. We shared an explosion of exuberance and hope, through a traditional collision of love.

However you feel about the situation in the Middle East, you’d be a weak cold person to deny two people the chance to celebrate their love in public.

Tonight families and friends from England, France and Israel embraced joy together, and your ‘umble scribbler immersed himself fully, emotionally and physically, into this roaring torrent of happiness.

Forgetting everything else, including my own physical limitations, I danced my arse off like a crazy gorilla, and regret not a second of it.

People often ask me what it means to be a writer. What’s it like to live by the word?

A privilege, a pleasure, it’s also painful, both emotionally and sometimes even physically.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.