ANOTHER YEAR SLIPS AWAY

As I look back on 2011, I can’t honestly say it’s been that great a year. I mean, it hasn’t exactly been a bad year, just one that was kind of nondescript. The only thing that I can say with any real certainty is that it most definitely actually happened, but, for me, it is only ever likely to be remembered as the thing that filled the gap between 2010 and 2012, not that I can make any guess as to what 2012 will be like as yet.

The year might very well end up being regarded as that insignificant blip that brought the relative delightfulness of 2011 into sharp relief. Mind you, with the rest of the nation possibly choosing to fall into a frenzy of sporting related activity, perhaps I should slink away and decide not to pay it much heed for the duration, after all I am slowly coming to terms with the sad fact that I seem to live in a society where having any kind of viewpoint that is considered to be other than the “norm” is something that it is better to keep quiet about rather than make a point of sharing.

There’s something to ponder on there, anyway, as we embark upon a year of potential sporting related hellishness in pretty much all of our media outlets. Ah, well… perhaps it will fly by and so won’t seem to hurt quite so much. Then again, we are also on the brink of what we hope will turn out to be another Jubilee year which reminds me, with the sudden horror that accompanies such realisations, that the year of “God Save the Queen (the fascist regime)” and the “summer of punk” was now THIRTY-FIVE years ago and all of those rebellious young things who have survived time’s crucible will be rapidly approaching what we used to think of as pensionable age now, with all the “youthful rebellion” now passed to the hands of yet another generation.

But, as the years stream by, it has become pretty amazing to me how quickly a single year can fly by. Sometimes it just feels as if we’re all hanging on by our fingertips to the surface of this spinning globe as our lives flit speedily away...

Recently I wrote a short piece about possibly a tiny fragment in the long life of Harry Morgan and one of my acquaintances pointed out that he’d had a good innings by reaching the grand old age of ninety-six, which, I suppose, as observations go, is pretty astute. The problem I have is that as I hurtle through what others might call “middle age” (although to me it still feels as if I’ve barely started), ninety-six really doesn’t seem so very far away and, not only that, I have to consider that such an age is rather the exception than the rule and someone with my eagerness to consume more than the odd bag of crisps whilst getting stressed about the most trivial of things is hardly likely to reach such a milestone.

The last decade, for example, seems to have vanished in the blink of an eye. The decade before that seems even shorter in my memories, and so, if a decade can merely be a blink, that great age of ninety-six can only be a matter of five short blinks away from the age I’ve currently reached, and, as my father only managed to live to be a mere one-and-a-half blinks older than I am now, in the normal natural order of things that avoids any unfortunate incidents involving buses or something, I can hardly expect many more than that for myself.

The abyss stretches out before me and I’ve barely got anything done. Heck, I’ve been putting off ringing up a builder for two years, so what hope have I got of actually achieving any of those great plans I once thought I had?

The celebration of the new year, coming as it does so shortly after the marking of the solstice, always brings out the worst in me, reminding me, as it does, how short a year can really seem. Each weekend seems to arrive now before the working week feels like it’s yet got going and fifty-two seems such a very small number to count up to. I’m pretty sure that any reasonably bright child could count up to that with minimal coaching in (ironically) a matter of moments, which, of course, in the end, is precisely what life is.

The year ticks by. January arrives and the February love hearts are already in the shops whilst our minds race ahead to long hot summer days. The hearts disappear and are restocked with Easter Eggs and gardening equipment. We get to the end of June and some of the plants we planted are in bloom, and I usually make the joke that the nights are drawing in (ha, ha), and, before you know it, September has come and gone and you’re already giving thought to the next year’s holiday or the coming Christmas. Fireworks appear and disappear in a puff of smoke and then it’s all sleigh bells and snowmen and sparkling white wine and another year has vanished into history.

It snowed a few mornings ago and my mind found it so very hard to believe that it was nearly a year since the snow last fell. I was sticking Christmas cards to the living room door and it seemed just a moment since I had last done it. I opened up a box of tinsel to garland the pictures on my walls and it seemed as if it was only last week that I had been doing the very same thing in the very same place, as if I’d merely paused in my endeavours, dozed off as I stood upon that chair, shaken myself awake again and carried on. But somewhere in that moment of déjà vu, a year had gone by in a terrifying, aging instant.

I sometimes feel as if I could stare into a mirror and actually see the decay and desiccation of myself as it happens, the spreading greyness and the increasingly interlocking network of lines, watch as all of those hopes and dreams and grand plans just fade away into nothingness and defeat, as the memory of yourself becomes as that of the memory of an illicit smile shared with a stranger on a hot summer’s day just fades into a fond memory of might-have-beens that you eventually convince yourself probably never really happened and sometimes you start to wonder whether you yourself ever really happened either as the days turn into months and years and decades and slip away like butterflies upon the breeze of a bright summer’s afternoon.

Happy New Year, and, if this one doesn’t work out for you, just remember that there’ll be another one along any minute…