Man alive, this year hasn’t exactly tumbled out of a bed of optimism and spun around the room in a flurry of bonhomie, has it? It’s not struggling into petticoats of unadulterated joy, bunching up its tresses in a band of sunshine and rushing down the curving stair to greet another benign dawn, is it? So far, so shagging bleak, if you ask me.
I was talking to an old friend on the telephone on New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t a festive call; she wasn’t Skyping from New Jersey or Perth, decked out in a pair of twinkling Christmas earrings, her face flecked with gin tears; no, she only lives down the road.
The conversation, transmitted through a grubby plastic handset (at least at my end), was pretty mundane and may well have focused on supermarket opening hours. Then she said: “I have a bad feeling about 2015.”
My friend isn’t known for her optimistic disposition. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a lovely, generous, interesting person, but she’s not exactly a little ray of sunshine. She’s the kind of person who will confidently assure you that you’ll get piles from sitting on the radiator, although that will be the least of your worries as you’re almost certain to contract Weil’s disease from drinking beer by the neck of that bottle in your mitt, before the piles even develop.
According to my crepuscular mate, the country is awash with urinating rats relieving themselves on beer crates, and it’s odds-on that before you peel your backside off the heater and reach for the peanuts, you’ll die screaming. And while we’re on the subject, she said, never eat communal bar snacks, because some uncultivated chaps, who also dip into the bowl of munchies, pee, shake, and fail to wash.
Imminent danger
She is what might kindly be described as a worrier. One of her most pressing concerns is cat shit, and she has been known to pour disinfectant into her flower bed when she spies an offending turd. In her creatively anxious universe, we are all in imminent danger of getting toxoplasmosis, incurable encephalitis and a tincture of necrotising retinochoroiditis every time a moggy evacuates.
What I’m trying to say here is that you don’t want to be a dahlia in my mate’s garden.
I don’t always take her seriously; she’s the girl who has shouted “Eek, unwashed wolf” once too often. So when she texted me, shortly after I arrived for a holiday in New York a couple of years ago, to tell me that Hurricane Sandy was about to hit, I assumed that the city would in reality be buffeted by a light breeze. I was soon laughing on the other side of my storm-torn face.
Similarly, when her forecast for 2015 was about as effervescent as a used hanky, I thought, no, don’t go there, hang on to hope, this is just here-comes-the-wolf territory.
But it hasn’t been easy to keep one’s disinfected pecker up in the past couple of weeks, has it?
Nationally and internationally, the news has been grim. As the daughter of a cartoonist, I listened carefully to the description of the working environment at Charlie Hebdo from a former journalist at the satirical magazine, who described its atmosphere as "playful and feminine". And if only those graceful attributes could protect you.
Anyway, I was feeling a little cowed, a little low. The morning news pumped out information like a toxic spill. Syria. France. Hospital beds. No hospital beds. Stab wounds. Car wrecks. Another woman dead in another thin apartment in another aimless town.
Lousy host
I went for a walk. I know my luck. I have freedom, I make choices, I have a home to come home to, a keyboard to welcome me, a cat to stare at me, a kettle to plug in.
“Try walking!” says the poster outside the local chemist. “It works!”
January is an odd month. Like a lousy host, she invites you to party, but when you arrive, the lights are out and she’s gone to bed. Run into her next day, on a sharp-lit, bracing morning, though, and she may surprise you with her warmth.
I looked out to sea, watched diligent, solitary, hooded crows drop clam shells on to rocks, splitting them apart. On the wet sand, squadrons of newly arrived Brent geese were having a convention, lecturing, debating, celebrating, comparing routes. I spotted a seal in the shallow water, romping like a puppy. The light was crisp and thin enough to slip into your wallet.
Is there a word for gratitude and guilt?