A Tolerable New Year

January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity, noted as the guardian of revolving doors, with special responsibility for the safe return of goods to their shop of origin after the gift-giving season.  Traditionally, offerings to Janus took the form of credit notes, rather than cash. January is thus a time for refunds, swaps, reviews, fresh starts, and subscription renewals.

It's also a time for simultaneously looking back, and looking forward. Pro tip: Don't try this at home. In fact, here is some even better advice, which I wholeheartedly endorse, despite generally failing to follow it myself: never go back, never dwell on the past.

But, as you take the sharp January bend into a new year, it's impossible not to glance back and find yourself confronted, however briefly, with the trail of wreckage you have left behind, not just in the previous year, but in all the preceding years. Although it's true that, with the turn of each successive year, the view of the past does seem to improve as it fades further away, like the vista back down a mountain road of hairpin bends. This, despite the fact that what most of us see down there is the strewn debris of a lifetime of broken resolutions, missed opportunities, abandoned projects, wasted potential, and poor choices. Reason enough to refasten one's gaze on the road straight ahead once more. This time, it will all be different!

But the chances are it won't be very different at all, and inevitably around this time of year I catch myself in a pensive, retrospective mood, mulling over the past, and that zig-zaggy trail of wreckage. In particular, I often end up contemplating my Lost List of onetime friends and wondering, "whatever happened to So-and-So?" It is one of life's nagging known unknowns not to know with any certainty whether someone you once thought of as a close friend, or even as a possible partner in life, is still alive and thriving out there in the world somewhere. Or, um, not.

No matter how fortunate you have been in your friends, or how assiduously you have tried to keep in touch with each other, some will simply have vanished from your life, and may even already have left the scene permanently. Everyone, but especially those of us who were young in pre-Internet days, eventually has a Lost List. All it took back then was a few changes of address, some mild "musical differences", or just one significant solo turn off the metaphorical road you once travelled together, and they had disappeared. Curiously, it seems to take a special effort of imagination to realise that you have vanished from their lives, too. I think many of us nourish a narcissistic fantasy of walking back into a certain place – it might be a pub, or a cafe, or a convivial room – where all those past acquaintances sit waiting in a state of suspended animation for your return, like Norm Peterson walking into Cheers. Yay! So what have you been up to for the past fifty years, man?

It is the B-side of this fantasy that, just as our lost friends remain Forever Young in our memory, so too do we in theirs. Which is weird. Especially when you think quite how much you have changed, both in appearance (argh) and in your beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. I don't know about you, but I was an idiot when I was 20. I cringe with embarrassment when I think of some of the things I thought, said, and did, back then. That there are people out there who may still think of me as that posturing young buffoon, utterly unaware of the wise, caring, sober-sided-father-of-two and now white-haired citizen I have become since – at least in my own estimation – is both amusing and appalling. No wonder so few of them have stayed in touch.

Mind you, they were mostly idiots, too. They are probably equally embarrassed, and rightly so. I'm thinking of the ones I knew in that youthful dreamtime that lies between your late teens and early twenties, when everyone still has their full unspent allocation of unrealised potential and the world is still – for the lucky, talented few, at any rate – an enticing board-game of unmade choices. Everyone is still a contender; the dice are still in the cup, uncast. So, while we're waiting for the game to begin, why don't we all have some fun? Well, why not? Hey, why don't we try out for size some things we may regret or try to forget for the rest of our lives? Great idea!

It doesn't take long, though, once the dice have rolled, for the snakes and ladders of real life to begin. Paths immediately diverge. Tagged as an incorrigible hedonist, rarely rising before noon, and ironically something of a stranger to the library, I quickly became unnecessary company to my more serious-minded and career-orientated acquaintances, not least those I had met at a college noted as a launchpad for eminent public lives. I didn't mind: it made it easier to identify the like-minded souls. As someone once said, the dancers will inherit the party. And what a party it was!

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –

Not so when I have danced for an hour:

The dancers inherit the party

While the talkers wear themselves out and

sit in corners alone, and glower.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

At the risk of coming across as some kind of sociopath, it has always been a source of great pleasure to me that, although a few old playmates did become public figures, none ever became truly famous. Which was fortunate for them, too, I hasten to add, fame being famously a curse: apart from the all-encompassing inconvenience, it seems that household names rarely inhabit happy households. Plus, to be absolutely honest, I have always been particularly grateful that none of my old friends ever sought success in a creative pursuit that I might have actually have envied; as a novelist or poet, say, or even as a blogging photographer, come to that. That would have been tricky, and I might have needed to resort to blackmail, or at the very least leave a lot of one star reviews on Amazon.

For most of us – certainly, for most of those still figuring on my address list – there will have been the pleasures, satisfactions, and occasional frustrations of a normal, useful life; in my case, nearly forty years of selfless service to the bibliographic needs of the staff and students of two universities: you're welcome! Also, for those like me who decided early on to fold the hand they were dealt and sit out the wider game – hey, someone has to order the takeaways and make the coffee – there are the philosophical consolations of the slacker's manifesto:

But leave the Wise to wrangle, and with me
The Quarrel of the Universe let be:
And, in some corner of the Hubbub couch'd,
Make Game of that which makes as much of Thee.
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald translation

After all, looked at in the right way– maybe try squinting a bit? – it's not so much wreckage you can see scattered across the road back there as leftovers, packaging, and jettisoned ballast: traces of a life that, remarkably, turned out to be yours. Again, sorry, there are no January refunds or returns, and there's really no point in indulging in buyer's remorse: what you see is what you got.

So, properly considered, there is really no need at all to resolve that this time it will all be different. Another round of the better bits of the same-old same-old will do just fine, I reckon; ideally, of course, with as few as possible of the worse bits and no unpleasant surprises at all. That, surely, is what we mean when we wish each other a "Happy New Year", isn't it? Or, as an old friend from 50 years ago put it (one who, I'm glad to say, has stayed in touch): "Have a tolerable 2025 (let's not aim too high)".

I'll drink to that... So: Here's to a tolerable New Year! May 2025 turn out to be not too bad, really, all things considered! And, crikey, there's already quite a lot to take into consideration, isn't there?

 Your blogger attempts "May You Never..." , ca. 1973 [1]

[1] Actually, "Home Ranch", by Thomas Eakins, 1892, reversed laterally to get the guitar the right (wrong) way round (Philadelphia Museum of Art).