December

These are my bad weeks. It’s the same every year. If I seem reluctant to come out and see you on some kind of social occasion, don’t take it personally. I’ve just decided to save you the hassle of bothering with December Me, who bears a moderately close physical resemblance to Rest Of The Year Me but is grumpier and almost pathologically focussed on sleep. I’ll be ok shortly. I always am. But during this part of the year, in the diminishing grey-brown smear we laughably still refer to as “daylight”, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m in the trash compactor from Star Wars with the walls closing in. I'm always taken aback by how quickly the sensation arrives, typically around November 20th. One day I’m walking in the flaxen light of an exemplary autumn day, holding a gate open for an octagenarian horse rider, listening to her potted life story and thinking “Wow, I feel pretty good, considering, and look at the world and its intertwining magic: maybe early winter will be different this year!” then, in the dullest flash a flash can be while still being a flash, there it is: Survival Month, None More Black Month, Ghosts Of Rubbish Christmases Past Month. The feeling will go on, I know, approximately until Winter Solstice, when R2-D2 shuts down the system just in time to stop me getting completely crushed.

The knowledge that these bars of darkness, closing in on the day from each side, will not continue their progress forever is there within me, owing to what I have learned over 50 previous Decembers, but that doesn’t mean that my body does not respond to this time of year with primal terror, an instinctive need that makes me want to run and tidy myself away in a drawer. I suspect it would be a bit different if I didn’t also feel like such an alien when confronted, from all sides, by the consumerist pretence that this is actually the best time of year. "Are you ready for Christmas?" If by that you mean am I poised to do all I can to avoid shops and the gormless lying face of festive celebrity capitalism then thank the Goblin Animist Gods that these dispiriting mopwater days are getting lighter then yes, you bet, I am absolutely 100% fucking ready.

The way I way have come to look at it is this: everything that scares you is worse in the middle of the night. December is the macrocosm of that. Spring is my morning. It’s not proper morning yet in January, but in January I might hear a woodpecker warming up for spring on an oak tree across the lane. It’s different to now, when the only sound is the wind and rain getting annoyed that our landlady put in double glazing to stop it getting into our bungalow, then taking its rage out on a Phormium I potted the summer before last and a sickly wood pigeon with all the summer fight gone from its fragile wings. I’m a Morning Person, and a Spring Person, and these two characteristics seem to me fundamentally intertwined. But I still need the night, understand its significance and function. You can be naturally opposed to something but still understand its meaning. I’ve never read the book The Meaning Of Night by Michael Cox, so I don’t know if that’s what it’s about. Michael Cox published the book, to wide acclaim, after a £500,000 advance from his publishers, in 2006, then died, two and a half years later. Not long after that, my dad, who is also called Michael Cox, but has never received £500,000 from anyone, started getting emails via his website from readers of the other Michael Cox, saying “Sorry to hear you have died.” He got another, not dissimilar one, recently, which provided the kind of jet black chuckle which can help nudge a family through a particularly miserable and rainlogged December.