NYD 2020

Clevedon Pier, New Year's Day

 The view from Clevedon Pier...

I've never really been able to get into the factitious revelry of New Year's Eve – the last one I can remember truly enjoying was the transition from 1971 to 1972, as an underage drinker in a packed Stevenage "old town" pub, when "Maggie May" was still fresh on the juke box – and most years since I have managed to avoid it, whether by accident or design. In recent times this has meant retreating to our Bristol flat, with perhaps a midnight excursion to the viewing area at the top of the Avon Gorge, weather permitting, where fireworks may be admired bursting over the city.

My own little end-of-year / start-of-year tradition is a New Year's Day excursion in order to take at least one New Year's Day photograph, whatever the weather, and when in Bristol this has usually meant a trip down to the Bristol Channel at Clevedon. This year the dismal Dorset Christmas fog had followed us, but its effect at north-west-facing Clevedon was delightful: a pearlescent shimmer that endowed everything with a liminal sense of mystery and insubstantiality. A very suitable beginning, I think, to a new decade in which the hollow sound of empty promises hitting the solid wall of reality, like birds flying into a windowpane, looks to be the likely keynote.

Round the back of the seafront houses and cafes, we stumbled across the yard of a curiosity shop, full of the most wonderful, grotesque garden statuary I have ever seen. If I had a decent-sized garden, a few grand to spare, and a lorry, I'd have bought the lot. Whoever makes these – they appear to be castings made in some sort of stone-dust and resin mix – is a genius of taste. In better light on a longer afternoon I could happily have spent hours in there. Come the summer, I probably will.

On New Year's Eve we had the bizarre experience of seeing a number of vintage Yoko Ono videos from the 1960s – including the famous "Cut Piece", in which a passively-seated Ono has her clothing cut away with scissors by the participants – which were looped on TV sets on pedestals, one plonked in each of the rooms of the Georgian House Museum. Than which a more unlikely combination of aesthetics it would be hard to conceive. A fitting end, I suppose, to a year of conflict, cunctation, conspicuous cowardice, and confusion.

My attention was drawn by one of the samplers on permanent display in the museum, carefully stitched by a girl housed in a Bristol orphanage in 1794, the year of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as it happens:

Mary Ann may be long gone, but her needlework lives on. Let's hope her hopefulness was properly rewarded in life. And may I wish you all a happy and, yes, a hopeful New Year!