FIDELMA COOK

ALWAYS I’ve thought of the first day of the New Year as untrammeled snow. In my mind’s eye the coming year stretches out as field after field of pristine whiteness, like our souls are meant to be after a good confession.

Everything sparkles and radiates light; clean, clean light – and a low pulsing excitement of all to come. Radiates hope, I suppose. Hope, for once, over experience. For, if only briefly, we can turn our backs on what was and cannot be undone, and look forward to the endless possibilities ahead of us.

All the sins and miseries wiped away with the last hour of the year.

For me, tonight is a time for reflection and a last look back before turning the page.

I prefer to spend it alone, mainly because in the few forays out over the years I somehow always disgraced myself before those infamous bells.

I had no sense of pace; no measured steps towards the midnight hour and the televised countdown as a backdrop.

Nope, Ms Cook had usually, mentally anyway, left the building long before the clutching of hands and the nauseating Auld Lang Syne with its up/down, in/out movements.

I blame it on the fact that it was not my culture and therefore I had to try harder to show my appreciation.

In truth I just got awfully overexcited and had to be packed to bed in some poor soul’s spare room; the bed covered in coats and wraps, me under them.

Ah, but that was my early-ish years in Scotland when I was bemused, having turned up for a Hogmanay party at 9pm, to be sent home until after the bells.

Strangely, my newspaper colleagues had a fine contempt for the evening. They scorned the excesses of the “civilians”, labelling it Amateur Night Out.

But oh, what professionals they were the rest of the year. Many are dead now, hardly surprisingly, and without being morbid, I think of them all on this night.

Indeed I think of all those I knew once upon a time and give full rein to my memories. Sometimes I remember with a little pang of shock that X is actually dead or Y went last year. It’s not because I am very, very old – more that many of them were very, very young.

Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be sitting here, sunk in gloom in my French field, mourning all that is lost and gone, ticking off the steps still left to climb before dropping off the edge. Let’s face it, I can do that any day of the week.

No, I’ll crack open a bottle of champagne, stick a straw in it and click into those – happy – memories while watching the usual merde on TV.

Hell, I’ll probably even shove on the oven chips.

But I think, like many of us, there is a dreadful trepidation this year over the 12 months to come.

For me, for the first time I ever can recall, that pristine snow is already dirtied and scuffed with the almost unbelievable changes 2016 has brought.

Islamic State atrocities; Brexit; Trump; the ugly march of the far right – almost all too shocking to comprehend.

The ground seems no longer solid underfoot; the structures and strictures of society seem no longer applicable and hatred and vile xenophobic abuse are commonplace.

There is a glee, a relish, in the unspeakable, and a brutish desire to trample all under foot in a rush to dominate.

There is no solace in our ever increasing ability to be as one on all the platforms opened up by the internet.

Instead, those platforms serve as a portal to the warped, vicious, evil thoughts of those who use it to attack, demean and terrify the weak and the decent.

Perhaps I see too much given that, both professionally and personally, I rely on that portal far more than many and spend too many hours passing through it.

My immediate farming neighbours have little time for the navel gazing in which I indulge. Or the internet itself.

Here, fields still have to be sown, beasts hunted, euros set aside for machinery to be replaced.

I asked Miriam if she were worried for our forthcoming elections and the rise of Le Pen and the Front National. “No,” she said, her shoulders rising in that shrug. “It won’t happen. We’ll vote her in the first round as a protest but after that, no.”

And Trump, IS, sheer bloody life? Another shrug. “What will be will be. I don’t worry about these things. If it’s my fate, our fate, then all the worrying in the world won’t change it.”

I’ve heard this over and over again around here.

A part of me rather admires this stoic acceptance of fate. But only a very small part – the tired corner of me that always wants to turn my face to the wall too readily.

The rest of me, the best of me, wants to fight, resist and continue to do so until all hope is lost. But then I don’t believe hope is ever lost. There is always hope. There must be.

Bonne Annee.