Ro Cambridge

Do you remember the song When You’re Smiling, which was popular in the 50s and 60s? Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams all crooned their debonair way through it. Doris Day, Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald sang it, too.

In the uncomplicated universe of the song’s lyrics, positive and negative human emotions are mimicked by the weather. ‘‘When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling / The whole world smiles with you / And when you’re laughing, oh you’re laughing / Then, the sun comes shining through.’’ But ‘‘when you’re crying you bring on the rain’’.

I wasn’t exactly crying when this song floated into my mind this week, but I was feeling pretty miserable. It happens every now and then.

For a day or two it feels as if some particularly ruthless teacher has scribbled COULD DO BETTER in red pen all over my life. The feeling doesn’t ‘‘bring on the rain’’, it just leaves me roaming the gloomy interior of my own limited self, bumping repeatedly into the same over-familiar pieces of furniture, tripping on the same worn-out rag of carpet.

It was during this bout of melancholia, that the melody and lyrics of When You’re Smiling infiltrated themselves into my consciousness.

I’d like to report that the pathetic fallacy of the song restored me to a cheerful and optimistic frame of mind and made the world seem a better place. But no, it was a good night’s sleep and a long walk with the dog, that lifted the internal pall.

I am now feeling better ‘‘in myself’’ as the expression goes, but smile as I might, the world is not smiling with me. In fact, the wretched reverse of the song seems true: when the world is crying – as it most definitely is – surely human beings must weep too?

It’s impossible as an individual to escape culpability for climate change and its hideous manifestations: who hasn’t ridden in a car, flown in an aeroplane, or bought something made of plastic or packaged in polystyrene?

We are to blame for the thirst-crazed koala, the burning home, the sickened stream, the plasticclogged gut of a seabird, the drowning island.

How not to feel crushed by the knowledge that

For the optimistic, technology promises hope. For the pessimist, technology shrinks hope...