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I live near some primary schools and when I go for my paper in the morning, I see parents taking their children to school. The parents trudge along, heads down, faces covered, thinking about the stresses of the day ahead; but the children skip; they turn the necessary walk to school into a dance, a work of art. Children are natural artists and their medium is play. Watch them and you realise how creative they are, bringing new worlds into existence, composing elaborate fantasies peopled with characters conjured by their own imagination. This capacity for creative play is the most distinctive thing about the human animal. Some scientists believe it was the engine that drove our evolution to make us the remarkable creatures we became. We have much in common with the other animals on the planet, but what separates us from them is our capacity to make art. That is why we leave our mark on the earth after we are gone and they don’t. Like us, they leave the dust of their bones behind, but we leave more than our dust: we leave the cathedrals we built, the books we wrote, the music we composed, and paintings that capture the mystery and adventure of our own strange being. The philosopher Arthur Danto described the human animal as an ens representans, a being that represents the world back to itself. All the glories of human art and creativity flow from this compulsion to re-present or make over all the worlds we inhabit and experience. Through us and only through us is this fleeting world paused and captured and recorded, before it hurtles into the past like everything else. The horrid year that is grinding to a close has put our creativity, our art, and those who make it, under threat. It should be the first, not the last thing we restore. On November 11 1918, at the end of the Great War, another time of darkness and confusion, the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote these surprising words: Everyone suddenly burst out singing And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight. That’s the kind of delight I see in the children who dance down the streets where I live. Children are the original artists of that delight, but it may not be too late for us all to become as little children and join their dance. Maybe we should all suddenly burst out singing and send the horror of this year drifting away. It is time we joined the festival of life and all started skipping again.