WELCOME, everyone, to the story of Ian and Carmen and Steve and Simon and the Christmas tree.

The tree in question is the one at Darfield Museum where Ian and Carmen and Steve and Simon are volunteers.

It was agreed a few weeks ago that they would get together on a Saturday morning to take the lights off the splendid tree and roll them up and put them in a box ready for next Christmas.

And then they would reward themselves with a cuppa and a slice of cake and Ian would get cake crumbs down his jumper and he just wouldn’t care.

Indeed, later he’d pick the cake crumbs from the jumper when nobody was looking and eat them.

Ian and Carmen and Steve and Simon began the task of stripping the tree of its lights. Ian, for one, underestimated the amount of lights there actually were on the tree.

Imagine the night sky and all the stars in the known universe: that’s how many lights there were on the tree. Ian started to take some lights off the tree and roll them up, and so did Carmen and Steve and Simon.

There were certainly a lot of lights. Ian found that the best way to do it was to walk across the museum’s spacious patio, dragging a length of lights behind him and then roll them up. Carmen said something like: ‘Rolling up lights isn’t your forte, is it, Ian?’

To be honest Ian disagreed: surely the best way begin to roll up your Christmas tree lights is to walk across the patio dragging them behind you like a giant anaconda and then criss-crossing the patio so that they become, now what’s the word? Ah yes: tangled. Retangled.

Carmen and Ian were both holding plugs so that they didn’t end up rolling up each other’s lights; this, for reasons Ian couldn’t quite grasp, would have been disastrous.

Carmen rolled her lights carefully around a special light-holding thing. Steve and Simon did the same. Simon would occasionally hold up a vast maze of lights bundled together and shake them vigorously. Against all the odds, they seemed to fall into circles on the floor that could be easily wound up. Ian tried the same trick but it didn’t work for him.

Steve wondered aloud why wires of any kind seemed to tangle themselves up. They are untangled when they’re on the tree but when you get them off the tree they are epically tangled.

It’s the same with the wires behind the telly: they start off as a couple of resting worms and by the end of the day, even though nothing has really happened, they’re like a bowl of spaghetti.

Ian, Carmen, Steve and Simon contemplated this weird tangled truth. Ian piped up with his ‘motion of the earth’ theory: the reason wires got tangled was because the earth was moving and turning through space.

Because the earth spins any wires on the surface will naturally get jiggled about, to use a scientific term, and that’s where all the tangling occurs.

There was a silence on the patio at Darfield Museum and then Simon said ‘theoretical physics isn’t really your forte, is it, Ian?’

And we all laughed. And he’s right, it isn’t.

The stately dance continued. Ian moved around the patio like a bloke with a plug on a long lead. Carmen wound her string of lights. Steve wound his string of lights. Simon wound his string of lights.

At times it felt like the operation would take until next Christmas. There was a wind-chill factor of minus summat which, as we all know, is mighty cold. ‘We volunteer because of the glamour!’ Ian says, to general laughter.

Ian carries on untangling; the winding will come later. Carmen has almost finished her roll of lights and the end, literal and metaphorical, is in sight.

Steve stoically winds and it seems like he is almost at the end of his roll. Simon has almost finished. Ian, to put it kindly, has a long way to go.

The other three have finished and then, suddenly and seemingly without any skill on his part, Ian has finished too. Not only the glamour of volunteering but the satisfaction as well!

Then next year we’ll untangle them again and put them on the tree! Come and join us as a volunteer at Darfield Museum: it may not be glamorous but it’s very satisfying!