DURHAM is on sale; most of it, anyway. There are not just reductions but further reductions, not just clearances but massive clearances. Even the Thai restaurant has 20 per cent off.

There's 50 per cent off "slimming packages", half price at Vision Express, at Woolies, on Age Concern Christmas cards. (They seek unwanted presents, too.)

Alone in the subdued city centre, only the Bronx Barbering Company seems not to be offering cut price.

It's New Year's Eve, 5.30pm, ruminative ranks of taxi drivers standing idle but hoping thereafter to be run off their feet.

The Market Place sits beneath a canopy of electric blue Christmas lights, like Ferryhill's but not so impressive. The window of City Sports is almost filled by a poster for Black Cat Fireworks.

This may be nothing to do with Sunderland Football Club, who officially adopted the nickname Black Cats several years ago, amid near-universal indifference from their supporters. The Stadium of Light has only damp squibs just now.

Beneath the familiarly mounted statue of Lord Londonderry, folk gather for the short procession to the Cathedral, eloquently floodlit, for the now annual New Year's Eve service arranged by Durham Churches Together.

It's the one we attended six years ago, on the eve of the new millennium. Much has happened since then which perhaps few would have imagined, and for which fewer yet would have wished.

Some bear lanterns, others carry rucksacks as if holding a change of clothing for festivities yet to come. By the great door of the Cathedral a gloriously nostalgic quartet - two squeeze boxers, a fiddler and a long haired chap with a wooden drum - is playing carols like On Christmas Night the Angels Sing.

It's wonderfully jolly, like the little band in the George C Scott version of A Christmas Carol. Were the Dean and Chapter themselves to enter from the cloisters to dance a festive morris, it would hardly appear surprising.

The Cathedral is lit by hundreds of small candles, placed around the base of its pillars, those attending also offered an individual candle in a holder rather like that with which the Ghost of Christmas Present lights Scrooge to remorse, and to redemption.

Simultaneously to hold pen, notebook and candle proving impossible, the latter is clenched precariously between nervous knees. The Ecclesiastical Insurance Office doubtless allows for such pyrotechnicalities.

The Salvation Army band plays at the front, the service beginning with the lovely but little heard carol Of the Father's Love Begotten, written in the fourth century (says the order of service, helpfully) by someone called Prudentius. He sounds like the soothsayer in Up Pompeii.

Like many more, the service makes use of the themes of light and darkness. It's effective, reflective but decidedly not selective. Unlike just about every other place of mass congregation in Durham this New Year's Eve, there are no bouncers at the Cathedral.

Though there's a retiring collection for the Red Cross Asian Earthquake Appeal and for the work of the Cathedral, it's also entirely free. Last year's special offer; this one's, too.

Welcoming a congregation of perhaps 500 or so, Canon Rosalind Brown supposes 2005 to have been a year of "very mixed memories". The Rev Ruth Crofton, Durham's United Reformed Church minister, also borrows from A Christmas Carol in her address.

Scrooge's story can be our story, she says. Like him we can all begin again in Christ. "I understand that one of the pillars in this Cathedral has a mistake in its pattern. It still helps keep the roof up."

Six candles are lit to symbolise the six years of the new millennium - symbolically or otherwise, 2005 goes out - while everyone is invited to write a "short petition", a sort of New Year message, which are collected by the stewards and placed before the crib.

Only the singing is surprisingly subdued, as if 2006 were worthy only of cautious welcome. Liturgically, of course, the Church's "new year" is Advent Sunday, which may explain why there are no hymns specifically for January 1. On this occasion, as on many others, For All the Years serves admirably.

After 45 minutes the choir sings a resonant blessing, the organist plays You Shall Go Out With Joy, the congregation heads happily homewards or (in one or two cases) into the Hog's Head.

The pubs remain quiet, the year old, the night young. The constabulary's mobile CCTV van has taken up position at the end of North Road, so as to be ready for the big film, the black mac pack is taking guard outside the pubs and perhaps remembering how Horatius kept the bridge, the scantily clad young ladies are emerging into the evening with little regard for what their mothers taught them and not much more for the weather forecast.

It's starting to rain on their precarious parade as we head towards the 19.54, the last train of 2005. Wringing in the new.

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