Apologia Pro Ryvita Sua

What, New Year's Eve already? Yes, indeed: Christmas is done and dusted – very nice, thanks – our children have gone back to their real lives in London, and, having returned from Dorset to Southampton briefly to re-up our clothing, we now find ourselves in the Bristol Winter Palace for New Year. It does feel a little bit like being royalty, this seasonally-adjusted, peripatetic life, except royals have no clue where clean underwear comes from, don't drive themselves across several counties in fog and rain, and certainly don't stand fuming in the supermarket queue on New Year's Eve with a modest wire basket of provisions, stuck behind a log-jam of trolley-pushers, all apparently under the impression that no shops will be opening in 2019. Mind you, the way things are going, they could be on to something. It seems HMV is to be the latest vacant space on the High Street. Sad, but unsurprising: the days of flipping through racks of vinyl LPs seem as remote, now, as my father's stories of following the milkman's horse with a bucket to collect up dung for the garden. So what was a shop, grandad?

As for 2018, it has been a good, productive, and at times exciting year for me, even if it has involved rather more travelling than I'd ideally have chosen to do. Anyone who says it is the journey, not the destination that matters has never been delayed sine die and sans snacks in an airport departure "lounge". I suppose the only real disappointments have been not getting any of my truly amazing entries into either the RA Summer Show this year (may your pots explode in the kiln, Grayson Perry, you ████!) or the final hang of the RWA Open. That, and the ongoing decline in reader numbers of this blog, and the sparseness of your comments. I miss the sparky dialogue of earlier times. What is the sound of one bloke blogging?

December 2017

(no frost this year, just fog..)

It occurred to me, as I scoffed the last remaining mince pie, that New Year's resolutions are really a form of self-cancelling confession-plus-absolution package. I'm too lazy: I will join a gym. I'm too self-absorbed: I will make more of the few friends I have left. I'm fat: I will eat nothing but rye crispbread. I'm ignorant: I will find a suitable evening class. The potentially active component of these packages, though, is not the self-prescribed solution – no-one sticks to those – but the recognition and admission of a personal shortcoming. That counts for something. It may be self-knowledge of a painful sort, but can also feel good, especially after a week or two wallowing in greedy materiality. Confession is, however, potentially addictive. The problem is that the illusory sense of a new start – like most addictive things – lasts only long enough for you to crave a fresh hit. But then there are so many potential confessions to make! Especially if you set the bar for fault-finding and guilt sufficiently low. The organized churches have been in this racket for centuries. Does the Catholic Church charge for confession? I have no idea, but I expect the first few are free, at any rate, just to get you hooked.

So, racking my brain to think of some personal shortcoming to admit to and possibly even remedy in 2019 – I must have some left – I decided that I had two contradictory tendencies that could do with some attention. On the one hand, most of my life I have tended to go with the flow. If there was an easy route to take that didn't require too much by way of effort or navigation, that was the way I went. As a natural loner with a mistrust of self-appointed leaders, this has inevitably meant spending a lot of time going round in circles. On the other hand, whenever some important opportunity has been presented to me – a chance to break out of whatever circular holding pattern I was in at the time – I have usually backed away, like a fox sensing a trap. In the immortal words of Groucho Marx, "Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". This is hardly revelatory stuff, however: I recently found my old school report book, and it's full of repeated warnings along the lines of "he's quite clever, but not as clever as he thinks he is, and very, very lazy. I'm concerned he will never fulfil his real potential". Yes, well, you had me pegged, guys, at 17 in '71 (now that was a year!), and I don't suppose 2019 will be any different. Apart from the salutary fact that you're all dead, now, and I'm not: there may still be enough time to do something about it! Perhaps this year?

The wonderful thing about New Year is that, for a day or two at least, we can persuade ourselves that all options are now open, all bets are off, and all psychic laws and constants are in abeyance. Anything is possible in the coming year: review, restart, reset, reboot! Of course, the same possibilities of renewal exist at every other time of year, it's just that this little liminal pause, however illusory, is like stepping through a threshold bearing the opposite inscription to that over Dante's entrance to Hell: All hope is to be found beyond this doorway.  It's always worth a gamble, isn't it, another throw of the dice? As that very wise man William James put it:

For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.
Afterword to The Varieties of Religious Experience

As we step serially through that threshold in our different time zones, let us all hope for more hope in 2019! We're going to need it...