The risk I'm willing to take to hear my favourite 'earwig' performed live

These two earwigs are from very different genres but both throb with exuberant optimism. One has to be a hopeless misery-guts not to be buoyed by them, not to want to dance to them, to especially want to join maracas-brandishing Peter Allen performing his Rio.

As an earwig, the Hallelujah Chorus is always in my ears but its Messiah is especially on my mind just at the moment. I have just booked seats for a looming grand performance of it at the Sydney Opera House.

Coincidentally, earwigs are on my mind because a stimulating new essay about them, Zachary Pace's Playback Mode - In Praise of Haunting Melodies has just alighted in my inbox.

But bear with me for a moment as I digress a little.

For, having bought my Messiah tickets just days before the federal and state governments' joint make-believe that the pandemic is over (so that mandatory quarantining of the COVID-afflicted is no longer to be required) I wonder if now I will even be brave enough to go out to the Messiah.

Might it be too risky now to rub shoulders, perchance to share droplets with, the throngs in the Opera House?

Although one usually prefers to live in a world of fairytale make-believe, the Australian federal and state governments' pretence that the pandemic is over (a science-ignoring fiction as creatively imaginative as anything by Hans Christian Andersen) somehow deeply disturbs.

As an elderly and no-longer robust citizen, I am one of those vulnerable Australians more likely to be killed by COVID once governments carry out their stated intention to dismantle most measures to identify and limit the spread of COVID.

The ABC's doggedly truth-telling Dr Norman Swan and cerebral infectious diseases authority Professor Brendan Crabb are among those openly horrified by what governments are doing.

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In all this, in votes-conscious politicians so spinelessly pandering to the irrational crankiness of the COVID-weary masses, we see in action the famous "tyranny of the majority" that has always been democracy's ugly face.

Now that COVID will stand an even better chance of winnowing fragile oldies like me, to go out into the let-it-rip world of NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet's toxic Sydney and its droplet-blizzarded Opera House is to dice with Death.

And yet, perhaps if one must catch one's death of COVID somewhere in our now science-ignoring nation, it might as well be at a performance of Handel's Messiah. Handel's masterpiece is, after all, a celebration of the absolute certainty ("A trumpet shall sound!") of our all one day being raised, singing and dancing, from the dead.

It would be a shame, cowering at home, to miss out on this live Messiah but then as reported above, its greatest hit, the Hallelujah Chorus, is always earwigging away in the playlist of my mind.

Readers, I do hope that your own earwigs have some of that same classical quality and are not all crass advertising jingles, Jimmy Barnes's bellowings and other trivia.

Zachary Pace in his piece is very good on the subject of bad, sanity-challenging earwigs.

"The condition of having a lyric or melody repeating in the mind to an excessive extent has been pathologised as stuck song syndrome," he explains.

"Neuroscientists call the song in question involuntary musical imagery, or an earworm, inspired by the German use of ohrwurm (an earwig) to name the phenomenon."

"Some involuntary musical imagery can disturb the hearer, and thus deserves the uncomfortable connotations of worming: writhing, tunnelling. [However] if the haunting melody disturbs me, I switch to another, more pleasurable one - dubbed [by researchers] a 'cure tune'."

Yes, very vulnerable to the awfulness of some of the burrowing, worming songs (my torments include Billy Ray Cyrus's Achy Breaky Heart, Abba's Dancing Queen and all of the syrupy hits of The Seekers) I am glad that I have the Hallelujah Chorus to turn to.

Yea, verily, with divine earwigging it unsticketh and driveth away stuck songs (miraculously, even The Seekers' toxically tenacious Georgy Girl) with the irresistible spiritual force with which, for believers, God's tuneful word brings tenacious Satan unstuck and sends him packing.

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