Carols, they'd be nothing without Helen and Rebecca conducting

Helen was back in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Choir this Christmas.

Helen, who had conducted the choir for as long as I have been loyally watching and listening to them in the library foyer, could never resist bursting into song while she was waving her arms.

She clearly needed to be back in there singing all the time.

Christmas Carols are like that. Rebecca replaced Helen.

Maybe Rebecca was occasionally singing along too, but the choir weren't on the stairs this year, so I wasn't watching from the side where I could check such things out.

Neither were there any chairs to sit on, though I have always resisted the chair, especially at rock music gigs.

Shows your age, shows you are weak.

However a stress foot fracture picked up walking all over Melbourne the week before meant that my dedication to the choir, standing with all the weight on one foot, both arms sagging with huge bags of hastily-bought presents and rolls of wrapping paper, was very sorely tested.

I leaned discreetly against a pillar. We all carry reddening-faced loves through life, and Christmas Carols is one I have been unable to shake.

I lay at my grandfather's big-booted feet as he crashed across the foot pedals of the Knox Church organ on Christmas Eve, driving the choir up into the rafters. I was 9 the last time I did that.

The following year, my grandfather, who trusted everyone, stepped out from a pavement in New York and was killed by a taxi driver.

That was probably when the desire to hear Christmas Carols was set in stone.

I have fallen for them in every form.

When Simon and Garfunkel recorded Silent Night on the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album, and ran a getting-slowly-louder news bulletin in the other channel, ominous talk of Vietnam, the death of Lenny Bruce, Nixon, the evil of the protest movement, and Richard Speck, the murderer of nine - nurses, of all people, I remembered how perfect the carol seemed as a counter to the awful mess the world had got itself into.

And back then, I was the most cynical 17 year-old on the planet. What Christmas Carol would you play in the other channel now?

Well, you'd still play Silent Night, because it is just one of those songs.

There are probably choirs all over Dunedin who are bigger and far more practised than the library choir, who did amazing choir recitals last December, voices soaring and swooping like roller-coaster carriages, but I was happy at the library at 11.45 every day for my 15 minutes from what was usually just 15 people, the personnel depending on who could get free from their desks at the time.

But why so few men? The descants were lovely this year.

The audience, always tiny, grew on the third day. I had visions of fighting for a spot on Thursday, but in the middle of the night before I fell into unconscionable pain and was faced with the alternative of death, or a visit to the hospital ED just in case there was a slim chance of survival.

I lay morphined and almost operated-on for another 36 hours before medical skill triumphed and I was able to go home.

But I had missed the choir. I felt dreadful.

On the second day I had even received a wave from one of the singers. I was sort of their only real fan.

I had asked my wife if there were any messages on my first day in hospital.

There was. Andrea, my friend in the choir, had recorded them on her phone and sent the singing as a "Get well quickly, please" message.

Nobody sleeps in a hospital, especially when your doctor has a furrowed brow during examination and the man in the next bed won't straighten his arm to stop his machine beeping.

You just lie there in the darkness, waiting. Sleep in heavenly peace is the only song that works.

Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.