A Second Lustrum of Calendars

Every year since 2010 I have produced a small number of copies of a simple spiral-bound A4 calendar featuring my own photographs or artwork, for distribution as a Christmas / New Year gift for close friends, family, and – before I retired in 2014 – my more esteemed co-workers. The numbers in those categories were never large, and are inevitably declining, so the costs involved in this largesse have always been manageable. The standard of art reproduction I choose is quite high (I use and recommend Vistaprint) so that each calendar constitutes a little portfolio of some of the better work I have produced in the preceding year. If nothing else, it's a nice way to be present in the domestic environment of some people I never get to see often enough.

It occurred to me – calendars being essentially ephemeral items – that it would be worth putting together a book to record some of them. So in 2019 I made a Blurb book with the title A Lustrum of Calendars (a "lustrum" is a fancy way of describing a five-year period, although it also had a more specific meaning in Ancient Rome), as I had decided to record the run from 2014 to 2018: the five-year sequence in which I seemed to have hit my calendrical stride most convincingly. To make the book more interesting, I also paired the calendar image for each month (on the right) with a photograph taken by me during that particular month of that calendar year (on the left).

Why? Well, a calendar picture is a very public kind of divination (a hostage to fortune-telling, you might say): in November you pick what seems like it might be a suitable image for, say, June in the following year, without any idea of what those few weeks in the future will be like, not least in the lives of those who will be living with that picture for the whole of that month. By pairing the two pictures I thought the book might suggest how each month in each of those five consecutive years had turned out for me, even if only as captured in a single photograph. I also thought it would be curious to see how often there might or might not be a connection of some sort to be made between the two images, the one as prophecy and the other as actuality.

This produced quite a big book of 134 pages, which in hard copy is inevitably also an expensive book. I had really only produced it for my own amusement, however, and didn't seriously expect anyone else to buy a copy (do I say that every time I make a book? I might as well...). So, now that another five years have passed, I have made yet another book for myself with an identical format and the unsurprising title A Second Lustrum of Calendars. But, in the spirit of my decision to use Issuu, I'm making it freely available as a PDF flip-book.

Here it is: you can either run it in miniature here within the the blog page, or – if you click the little circular device in the centre – you can go to a full screen view (recommended). From full screen press <ESC> to get back here on the blog.

Whether I'll still be sending out calendars every year until 2028 and then making a third five-year collection of them in 2029 when – with any luck – I'll be 75 and still "sound in body and mind" remains to be seen. It's remarkable how passing a milestone as predictable and inconsequential as a seventieth birthday can nonetheless compress, confuse, and complicate one's projections into the future. "Five years from now" – once the vast and storied distance between ages 8 and 13, or 13 and 18 – now seems both incredibly brief and alarmingly ephemeral as a span of time.

Kafka's very short short story The Next Village – which to a 17-year-old me seemed so hilariously surreal – now reveals itself as a glittering shard of cold-eyed, gritty realism:

Grandad always used to say: "Life is amazingly short. Looking back, even now, everything is all so closely crowded together that I can scarcely imagine, say, how a young person can make up their mind to visit the next village without the fear that – quite apart from any mishaps – even the length of a normally, happily unfolding life will be anywhere near enough time for such a trip."

OK, I exaggerate, but I recall writing in a post on that story in March 2009, not long after my 55th birthday, "is it not amusing ... that life, as lived, has an exponential quality which makes the banal, the eminently possible, as daunting as a trip to Mars?" Well, not so much amusing at 70, young 'un, as baffling. Why on earth would anyone want to go to Mars, anyway?

But if that vision of befuddled stasis seems a bit too comfily chair-bound, let me put before you another short, single sentence "story", one of Kafka's first published pieces, Wanting to Become an Indian, which embodies much the same idea, but filtered through Karl May in an exhilarating, ecstatic inversion:

If only you could be an Indian, ever-ready on a galloping horse, tilted against the wind, jolting again and again over the jolting ground, until you lost your spurs – there were no spurs – until you threw away the reins – there were no reins – and could barely see the land before you as smooth cropped heath, with the horse's neck and the horse's head already gone.

(my translation)

That's a vision of old age, too. Hoka hey!