As resolutions go, nothing beats the will to loaf, munch and sleep
It’s bliss, in its way, New Year’s Day. Unless, obviously, you’re giving up drink and carbs, in which case it’s not. But if ever there were a day for loafing around, eating leftovers and entertaining pleasantly, this is it. This is to New Year’s Eve what Boxing Day is to Christmas: a time when the pressure is off, you don’t have to get up early and there’s a sense that you can make all things new. The year is like a clean sheet of paper.
By contrast, New Year’s Eve is an ordeal. I normally go to bed around 11.30pm; if I stay up any later, I start to flag. After two hours of enforced hilarity, I want bed more than anything. This year, I got compassionate leave from the festivities, on account of having the kind of flu that makes bed the sweetest place on earth, but in general, I’m rubbish at seeing in the New Year.
My husband is from Kosovo, where New Year is the equivalent of Christmas: a bit like Scotland, minus the shortbread. They start dinner at 8pm and, as far as I can make out, go to bed at 5am. The first time I spent New Year’s Eve with them, I made my excuses at 12.15am. They thought I was completely weird.
End of civilisation as we know it (latest instalment): no more brown paper packages tied up with string.
Just before Christmas, I made my way to the general post office to send off a parcel to a friend. It was just the most perfect thing: a box closely wrapped in brown paper with stamps and a nice tight knot on the string. The lady behind the counter shook her head. “You’ll have to take that off,” she said. “The machines can’t handle string.” You can’t argue.
Especially when her next move was to hand me a leaflet giving details of where I could obtain postal services when this, the main post office of the metropolis, closed for good at Christmas.
It was an important institution, somewhere you could post letters at all hours and buy picture stamps. It was immortalised in Iris Murdoch’s novel Under the Net, when four drunk young men turned up there at 2.30am: “The General Post Office was spacious, cavernous, bureaucratic; sober and dim. We entered hilariously, disturbing the meditation of a few clerks and of the people who are always to be found there at late hours penning anonymous letters or suicide notes.”
No longer. But it’s much worse when rural post offices are closed and the entire sense of community life goes with them. I can’t see that post offices are actually redundant either. Now that everyone’s shopping online, this is precisely the time we need them, to return the stuff that doesn’t fit.
My campaign for the year is the restitution of Candlemas. That is, the extension of the Christmas season right through to its traditional conclusion, on the feast of the Purification of the Virgin on February 2.
In earlier times, Christmas started on Christmas Eve and carried on for 12 days until the Epiphany (this Sunday) and the arrival of the Three Kings at Bethlehem. But it didn’t stop there: the festivities continued in a muted, laid-back way right through January.
It seems like a good way to go. January is the most depressing month if you make it the start of an abstinence regime, when the weather is bleakest. If, instead, you think of it psychologically as an extension of Christmas, it takes on an altogether happier aspect.