Thank you for the music – again

Ladies and gentlemen, is hope too strong a word? I think not. For hope is the stuff of which we are made, the signature note of our species. And though there is plenty of reason not to feel hope, what with the repulsive Trump and the retreating ice-caps and my prostate clamping ever more firmly round the urethra like an anaconda squeezing the life from some innocent Bambi, nevertheless when I turned the television to an international news channel last night and heard the second item on the bulletin, something leapt from the waters of despair and flashed silver and alive and it felt remarkably akin to hope.

I am not, of course, referring to the story of the cuddly Korean with the oddball haircut and the ostensible change of heart. I can’t see a man who’s had most of his family murdered, and whose power is founded on keeping 20 million subjects in a) poverty, b) ignorance and c, d, and e) fear, and who has only achieved his current negotiating position by building nuclear weapons, renouncing nuclear weapons. Or, for that matter, when his entire empire is founded on a lie, keeping his word. Vide leopards and spots.

So it will come to nothing. A year from now vast batteries of guns will still be trained on Seoul, and the cuddly one will still have a cupboard full of nukes that it would be suicidal for him to use but equally suicidal for him to dismantle, and his 20 million hostages will still be dining on hedgerow soup. In other words, no news there.

But then came the second item and my eyes widened like the eyes of a throttled Bambi. And what widened them was joy, joy so uncontainable that I leapt from the chair and cried out. ‘‘O Agnetha,’’ I cried. ‘‘O Benny, Bjorn and Anni-frid!’’ (And even as cried I realised for the first time that the palindromic title by which these four are known derives from their initials.)

For the second item on the bulletin, ladies and gentlemen, was that Abba are getting back together. I’ll say it again while you absorb its import; Abba are getting back together. Now do you think hope is too strong a word? No, neither do I.

This is no mere reunion for old times’ sake. Nor is it some cynical post-farewell-tour farewell tour in search of cash to pad the pension. No, ladies and gentlemen, this is a creative resurrection. For Abba, hold your breath now, are going to release two new songs.

Of course, to call an Abba song a song is to undersell it a thousand fold. Abba songs are art. They are wrought in the furnace of the finest minds. They speak in perpetuity of the human condition. And we are to have two more of them. How blessed are we?

My only worry is time. When Abba erupted on to the global stage, their bodies housed in vinyl jump suits and their heads alive with ideas, they had an average age of twenty-something. Now they have an average age of 70.

Shakespeare was dead at 52. Mozart at 35. Schubert at 31. Are the septuagenarian Swedes still vitally alive? Are they still capable of a piercing historical analysis to match their youthful ‘‘My my, at Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender’’? Can they defy time’s ever-strengthening prostatic grip, and come up with anything as profound as this epigrammatic couplet from 1977:

Ba ba ba ba baa, ba ba ba ba baa ba-ba Honey I’m still free, take a chance on me.

We don’t yet know. All we can do, ladies and gentlemen, is hope.