Profile January: The sales are on but pay-day is weeks away, the sun is a folk memory and even the trees are shivering. Shane Hegarty hails January
April, said T.S. Eliot, is the cruellest month. Nonsense. Right now, it would be worth sacrificing a birthday if it meant getting straight to April. April is no August, perhaps, but it is a good month. In April, the T-shirt isn't an item suffocating beneath three layers that are in turn water-proof, cold-proof and wind-proof. In April it's not dark when you leave for work and it's not dark when you get home again. In April the sun is not a folk memory.
For cruelty, look to January. Here is the hangover after December, the forfeit for enjoying the excesses of Christmas. It is the calendar equivalent of a long, miserable walk home after a great party. January is a malingerer, a party-pooper. This year, having enjoyed a decent break, we arrived out of the old year and into January fresh and invigorated, buoyant and bold. January saw our giddiness and took action. Which might explain why, only a few hours into New Year's Day, it summoned a sudden squall, a violent downdraft dubbed a "mini-tornado" that acted as a sobering slap. It was a point made effectively.
Since then, it has once again been a month for hunched shoulders and tattered umbrellas poking from bins. It is hard to keep up a mood of birth and renewal when the trees around us are naked and shivering and even the grass is reluctant to grow.
Besides, the fun is quickly pinched out by the return to work, which occurs roughly 12 months after you promised this would definitely, absolutely be your last year working in the job.
January was once described accurately as a month of empty pockets. Having been paid early in December, it becomes a month during which pay-day always seems to be three weeks away. Financially, no month quite stings like this one. When your bank balance either drifts inexorably towards single figures, or slides ever further into the red. We eke out the month as monthly and annual bills scramble through the letterbox. And by the time the wages department comes out of hibernation, used tea bags are already tumbling in dryers, margarine boxes are scraped clean of their plastic.
Even the promised salvation offered by the sales always disappoints. You must battle past a couple of elderly women fighting over the last 50 cent tea towel, only to get to a clothes rack that looks like a mini-tornado has paid it a visit. And you sift through the textile pile to discover that the pair of trousers you had your eye on is now available in sizes 8 and 26.
THE BEGINNING OF the month, and of course the year, encourages self-reflection, only for that to slowly dissolve into self-pity. New Year's resolutions disintegrate in the drizzle. Surveys suggest 70 per cent of us don't make it to the end of the month with our resolutions intact. January takes great pleasure in this, mocks us. Among the most popular resolutions is "to get more exercise". How can you get more exercise during a month in which it's impossible to run from the front door to the car without fear of a gale lifting you off your feet and into a tree?
There is no colder month than January. And there are constant reminders of just how cold that is thanks to the increasing number of skiers who return from the slopes to tell us. The Austrian cold, they tell us, is a dry cold. The French cold is a pleasant cold. The Irish cold, though, is an insidious cold. The Irish cold, as each skier must impart within moments of stepping from the plane, is "a damp cold that gets into the bones". Somehow, the January cold makes itself colder than it actually is through some feat of climatological dexterity. You could put mittens on each of your vertebrae and you would still be chilly.
EVERY DAY THERE are reminders of how much more clement it is on other parts of the planet. At any one time, it seems, two-thirds of the country's under-30s are travelling or working in Australia, a place where January has found itself part of the summer. There they talk of "glorious January days" and of "balmy January evenings". So we get regular e-mail and phone updates on how glorious the weather is there at this time of year, of how summery their summer is, and the occasional mention of how summery their winter will be too.
OK, so it is not all gloom, especially this year when trivial January blues are easily put into perspective by a glance at what is happening in South Asia.
Traditionally, the month is a good one for investing in the stock market, although that is quite useless information when you have no money to invest. And if you do sign up for an evening class you can finally become the Italian-speaking reiki master you've always wanted to be. There are decent programmes on the telly again as many of the big series return and new ones start. There are no costly celebrations, no Valentine's Day or Easter to raid the wallet. It gives us 12 months to replenish the bank account before Christmas once again wipes it clean.
Nevertheless, it would still be worth sacrificing a couple of bank holidays if it meant skipping straight to, for instance, the ides of March. That's if there were any bank holidays between now and St Patrick's Day. Which there are not. Instead, January lingers on, drawing on a full quota of 31 days. At least February has the decency to get out of the way after only 28 days. Actually, why not swap the two months around and shorten January? It would hardly cause the Earth to wobble to a confused halt in its orbit.
January's cunning is best illustrated by how it sneaked into the calendar that didn't want it in the first place. There were originally 10 months in the Roman calendar, with the year kick-started by taking a short-cut from December straight to March.
However, the stunted calendar meant having to throw an extra month in some years, so January and February were eventually introduced to even things out.
Most of the month is straddled by Capricorn, which is represented by a goat with a fishtail, so confirming its all-round ugliness. Even its name seems somewhat downmarket. It is named after Janus, the Roman god of "doors and gateways". March gets the god of war. April gets the goddess of love and beauty. July and August are named after Roman emperors. January has a god you might find working in a hardware store. By the way, the January birthstone is garnet. When was the last time your beloved asked you for a necklace made of garnet? When was garnet ever a girl's best friend? Janus, as it happens, is depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. Presumably, he is on the lookout for the bailiffs.