The year starts NOW
All hail September’s fresh start, says a fun-fatigued Dolly Alderton
IN AUGUST OF LAST year, I found my flatmate in the kitchen one morning before work, looking tanned, hungover and drained as she made her coffee, having spent weeks going from holiday to wedding to festival to pop-up bar. ‘What’s up, dude?’ I asked. ‘I just,’ she said, sighing, ‘I just miss having soup, Doll. You know? Days when work finishes at six, and you don’t have to go to a pub garden or some rooftop cinema and you’re home by seven and you watch some telly and eat some M&S soup.’ Missing Soup Syndrome, we now call it. The end-of-august feeling of fun fatigue; of wanting boring, habitual cosy normal life to resume. Well now it’s here. Remember when the year always began in September? The first day of school; the squeak of new shoes, the exercise books updated with recycled wrapping paper. You’d get a new haircut, bulk-buy scented gel pens and see the
opportunities of a year laid out in front of you right up until next July. What grades would you get? Which new friends would you make? What parties would you be invited to? How many more bases would you have reached with boys by the time the academic year was over?
I’ve never deprogrammed from that schedule. I work on an academic year cycle – and thank God; from international terror events, to deaths of treasured icons, to the unmitigated disaster of Brexit, 2016 has not been kind to us and I’m keen to see the back of it. For me, the new year never begins in the bloated, bleary-eyed, self-loathing comedown of Christmas, when diets are aggressive and bank balances are empty. For me, the year begins now, in the golden light of early autumn. ‘Life starts all over again when it gets crisp’, according to F Scott Fitzgerald. It’s good telly, baked potatoes. Crisp walks in a park that’s changing colours. The end of silly season.
And it seems I am not alone. Only recently, new research presented at the annual American Sociological Association showed that divorce spikes right after summer and winter holidays, in what was described as ‘the first quantitative evidence of a seasonal, biannual pattern of filings for divorce’. The facts agree: everyone wants a clean slate in September.
I’m not suggesting some of the national nightmares and global horrors of the past eight months can be erased by the rubber
THE AIR WILL GET COOLER, THE JUMPERS WILL GET THICKER, THE LEAVES CRUNCHIER
of one of my beloved newly sharpened back-to-school pencils; but September brings an overwhelming feeling that anything could happen. It’s an invitation to start again. To draw on your deepest resources of hope. To buy a shiny new academic diary and throw away the one you bought last January. Write a list of everything you want from the next year without the aggressive pressure of ‘new year, new me’ that January brings. You don’t have to be a ‘new you’ in September. You can be old you, rebooted. You can gently ease yourself into a run in the park. Or go watch a film one Sunday afternoon with that guy you’ve always kind of liked in the office. Or clear out your wardrobe while you listen to a long, meandering podcast. September will never demand that you make yourself unrecognisable.
And now the air will get cooler, the jumpers will get thicker, the leaves crunchier, the days slower. Hunker down, breathe a little deeper, watch verdant summer be hugged by burnished autumn and enjoy the blissful, mundane rhythm of life slowly rolling back in. I’m packing up the sunscreen, digging out my battered boots and sweeping away the cobwebs. My clean, fresh new year has emerged, yawned and stretched out mirthfully like a big, clear nectarine sunrise this week. I hope yours does too.