Nick Ahad: As a new age dawns, remember the arts are still worth fighting for

Okay, not really, but something inside definitely died on Christmas Eve 1989 when she asked me to help her take the Christmas presents downstairs.

I knew that Santa didn't really exist when I was 12 – but I still had some degree of childhood innocence left.

So when I carried those presents labelled from Santa for my two younger sisters and brother downstairs, each step downwards took me away from innocence.

Last week took me back to that time.

Before the Compulsory Spending Review I innocently believed there might be a saviour. A Spending Review Santa, if you like.

Right up until the moment George Osborne took his seat to applause and slaps on the back.

I knew, just as I knew for certain that there was no Father Christmas when I was 12, that there was to be no last minute change of heart. Until that moment I had clung on to the last vestiges of hope.

Surely the calls for saving Britain's arts sector from the sharpest cuts hadn't fallen on deaf ears? The eloquent and passionate arguments of people like Sir Nicholas Serota, and from Yorkshire's leading arts professionals in the pages of the Yorkshire Post would have been heeded?

They weren't.

And with this week's announcements from the Arts Council what the CSR means in real terms, we now face the awful reality that, in the next few years, a number of arts organisations are going to close.

It is reported that Churchill, during the Second World War, was asked to cut the arts for the war effort by Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood.

He responded with the phrase: "Then what are we fighting for?".

It made me ponder this week my own personal works of art for which I would fight.

Hamlet: I never understand when people say they found Shakespeare boring at school. The first time I read the "To be or not to be" soliloquy I learnt it by heart that night and still keep it close to hand. It's the greatest passage ever written about why we "grunt and sweat under a weary life".

O Fortuna by Orff. Not because it's played at football matches or routinely in adverts, but because its tale of fortune waxing and waning is something, for me, close to divinity.

Vincent by Don McLean. Not particularly highbrow, but it brings me to tears every time I hear it. One of the purest love songs I've ever heard.

Guernica: like a punch to the gut.

Then I realised. This list will go on forever, it's already been building in my head for the past few days.

A new age is dawning, our innocence is lost and the arts in our country are about to become an awful lot poorer.

Instead of dwelling on that, I urge you to think of the art that has enhanced your own life and remember why it is still worth fighting for.