I’m glad to see the end of August. As we’re all well aware, it’s been too hot and dry, a tedious stretch of discomfort and worry, ending with a washout Bank Holiday weekend. This month has not been august – tyrannical more like. I blame the Romans. They bulged the year out of shape, shoehorning in two extra months which lack a proper presiding deity and are named through vanity. They betray their impropriety in the way they shoved the modest, orderly final months out of their nominated places. September is now the ninth month. I ask you.
I compounded matters by spraining my ankle, without even knowing how I sustained the injury, which rendered, amongst other things, the Royal Albert Hall inaccessible. Day after day of glorious Prom concerts had to be struck from the diary. With regular activities in abeyance over the summer, I had focused on the Proms for purpose and activity and enjoyment and education.
I suppose August is traditionally indolent and aimless. It is the holiday month, a welcome respite if the rest of the year is laborious and effortful. My time is now always my own, in retirement. Staying at home, structure-free days, reclining with my feet up…none of these are special treats anymore and the pleasure they provide relates to their contrasting with the alternative gratification gained from the buzz of activity, pressure, purpose, achievement, sociability. I don’t have the balance right.
It’s been a particularly uneven year so far and I’m finding it impossible to maintain pace. Literally and metaphorically. When I look back (or look forward into the past, if I were of the Aymara people) my year contains events, but lacks continuity.
Scattered amongst the disconnected happenings, there are a few things I feel I perhaps ‘got right’ but they are things that anyone else could have done. I was merely near enough to be given the chance. I’m dispirited. Each day is a new day. Well, yes, but I also want them to link together, like fairy lights or paper dolls holding hands. I don’t always want to start afresh. I also want to feel I can build.
My best thing literally could have happened to anyone, more accurately did happen to everyone, but for once, this year, I attended to it. We spent the third weekend in June camping in East Anglia, close to the coast. Woken by my bladder at about 3.30am on the summer solstice, I staggered across to the loos, the sky lightening around me and the birds starting to sing. I knew I would regret returning to my sleeping bag. I woke my partner and we walked the fifteen minutes to the land’s edge, watched across the sea and waited. A small bank of cloud on the horizon forced us to be patient while the sun rose. Its beams broke out across the water. As early as it ever would, creating as long a day as it ever could grant us for this year. Astonishing, miraculous, diurnal, cyclical.
The main character in Richard Coles’ cosy crime novels (I am not ashamed to confess I enjoy these; I am won over by the kindness of the heart beneath the words) has a particular fondness for the start of the academic year. In more than one book, Canon Clements dilates on the pleasure of sharpening pencils, sorting pens and – he namechecks Rymans – the lure of the stationery shop. I can identify with this and in fact, not entirely subconsciously, I have spent the weekend tidying and sorting and, just now, washing the dried ink from my fountain pen to restore its functionality. I am ready for a fresh start.
The academic year is a man-made beginning, but it’s close to the tipping point of the vernal equinox. Just as the calendar new year is near to the solstitial nadir and the financial year to the spring equinox. The rhythms are deep set within us and perhaps I can use them to regain my own momentum. And find my own pace, if this pesky ankle will permit me. I’ve talked about resolution before and of course it has come round again. What happens when I want to re-resolve? My time is not only cyclical, it is also linear and I don’t want to waste it (from Latin vastare “lay waste,” from vastus “empty, desolate”).
lesleyjonesberry 