January

Wulf-monath. For the Anglo-Saxons, January was a perilous month of eking out; of waiting. A time when lean wolves ran down from the hills and looked hungrily in the villages for food. Cold and grey; desperate. The festivities were over; the shortest day had passed. Once again the sun had not perished. Now there was the earth’s dark sleep until spring,

From the watchtower at the observatory in Kielder Forest you can look out at night across the blackness of the trees, stretching away for miles. There is no light save the moon and stars and you can get a sense of how life would have been when most of the country was thickly forested and wild. We think we have tamed Nature now but every day we find this not to be the case. Even in this supposedly dead month things are stirring, preparing, defying the bleakness. Wolves no longer run wild here in South London but the etiolated shapes of urban foxes haunt our city dustbins with the same desperation; the sharp sal volatile of their acrid musk is on every discarded fast food wrapper. At night, the vixen-scream and the answering barks of the dog-fox remind us of the untameable potency of life.

I used to walk in these stopped days and look for the signs of revival everywhere; the strange vividity of the grass set against the wet black of the bare trees; the determined fragility of the first snowdrops. Now, in spite of the December snow, not much seems dead in London. The seasons have been smoothed out; tending towards the same homogeneity as our shopping centres. But January is always a time of new beginnings as well as of transitions. The Romans named the month Ianuarius after the two-headed Roman god Janus who looks both backward and forward at the same time. We still seem to acknowledge this contradiction: we look forward to the New Year with our unattainable resolutions, while we assuage the sins of the past year with our Dry Januaries and our diets and exercise regimes.

In an old diary I discovered a New Year’s resolution I had written years ago: pre-pandemic, pre-war, pre-climate emergency. I had written just one word: ‘less’. It seems prophetic now. But the more I thought about it, also shockingly arrogant. To desire less seems to imply you have more than enough and certainly you are not at all grateful for it. But that was not my intention: it was a yearning to abandon the pursuit of ‘stuff’’ and to take better care of the things I had, both materially and spiritually.

That aspiration undoubtedly went the way of most New Year resolutions and this year I won’t be aiming for ‘less’. Less is often forced on us; we do not have to seek it. And ‘more’ in the current bleak climate seems downright greedy. Instead our resolution must surely be to offer up to the world the things we have created in an attempt to defy the darkness: our art, music, poetry, ingenuity and compassion. And we must share this abundance in the hope that somehow it will be ‘enough’ to keep the wolves from devouring us.