1/365: The Menace is Loose Again

to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson

First day of the year and we are besieged by a storm. All night, it whips the corners of the house, I worry about falling trees and sloping roofs, but not so much to keep me awake. Old Year’s Night, and I take a walk alone for the last twilight of a year that will take some distance to process; the reservoir silver lit in the eerie dusk, as if pre-empting the wind that will soon blow in. In the fields earlier, we saw the wind churned sea, licked fingers we held up to tell the direction. I turn the music up, walk along my favourite street, my feet faster, faster, houses on the cliff lit but the park nearly wrapped in darkness by the time I turn for home, to change into my mother’s dress, black silk gold embroidered, and my grandmother’s pearls; old things to see the new in with.

Cinnamon buns at the bells and whisky before and after both, a late sleep, wake to the grey morning hardly worth looking out the window for, but the rule of the first of every year, or my rule, is it’s the final of a run of days spent inwards, before January’s two faces turn to the future. I am afraid of this year. I am afraid because I’ve known it was coming. Book release years are work but a certain kind of easier work, of traveling and talking and gathering ideas; the years between, intense work years. This year, I will travel often for work. I will be in archives again. I will be doing the work of careful piecing of other people’s lives, and there’s something exposing, destabilising in this; the details of other people’s lives often cause you to change your own. I do not particularly want more change, and yet, the work does what the work does. The chances are I will travel to various continents. I do not enjoy flying.

The between days at the dead end of the year, full of cooking and walking and thinking and turning towards the new, easier to think about what’s been and known than what’s coming, or so it was, until standing in the ocean earlier this year with the waves coming towards me and nowhere else to go - sometimes, you have to stand and let the thing come at you. I read there are years that ask questions of you and others that demand answers; last year both happened and just because a year has ended it doesn’t mean either the questions or answers are over.

Superstitious about the end of the year, I work on the 31st and the 1st; 31st, finish up a project this time last year I thought I’d messed up the chances of, 1st, begin the next draft of my next novel, read about my next biographical subject. It helps with the nerves. Control is a stupid illusion.

Spend more time than healthy in the kitchen. Control is an easier illusion with weights, measures, timings; I am at home there.

Sunshine forecast for tomorrow. Keep the peelings for the horses.

(I’ve decided to start doing the impressionistic snapshots of days I started doing here a while ago, and then stopped when it felt loud here - hard to explain a virtual space having a noise but it is what it is. I want something to look back on. I spend so long in archives that I want to do the similar here maybe, and I’m terrible at keeping diaries. Give me a blank page, and I start to work.)