On a Monday night before Christmas in a chapel in Abersoch, a concert is taking place. Abersoch is a seaside village on the Llŷn peninsula, the arm that sticks out from north Wales into the Irish Sea; and this is the end of term Christmas concert of Ysgol Abersoch, the local primary school, a wooden building across the road from the chapel.
On the pews, spaced out in an attempt to keep Omicron at bay, sit parents, villagers, governors, former pupils; some are all of the above, about 50 in total. At the front of the chapel, facing the audience on the other side of a wooden altar rail, are the performers: children aged between four and seven, and dressed colourfully, as an elf, a doll, an angel, a reindeer, a grandmother with orange hair … and that’s it. There are just five of them. Ysgol Abersoch is a very small school; that’s the problem, though not everyone sees it that way.
