January is a quiet time for most of us. The excesses of the festive season have taken their toll and most of us feel instantly queasy at the prospect of another mince pie or piece of Christmas cake, never mind a swig of Stone's Ginger Wine or Amaretto [now unfashionably called 'Disaronno'!], or whatever secret tipple it is that you only ever indulge in over the Christmas period. We vow to give up drinking, diet and take more exercise but the crippling cold mitigates against our good intentions and we finish up behaving just as badly, only we now feel guilty about it. Next year my New Year's resolution will be to not make any New Year's resolutions until the advent of spring. I want to see buds on the trees and bulbs in full bloom before I deprive myself of life's little pleasures.
I am one of those weird, warped people that actually likes January. I love to curl up with a good book by a fire, or watch crap movies on TV, or God forbid, 'Silent Witness', after a good stew or casserole and a glass or two of a robust, preferably Languedoc, red wine. More importantly, I always find that I am inspired to work, albeit at a leisurely pace, in January. There are so few distractions to lure me away from my desktop, I give in gracefully and go to bed genuinely looking forward to getting up in the morning and getting going again. Lunch, of course, intervenes, especially when I decide to raid the vegetables in the fridge to make masses of hearty soup. Apart from the ritual of making it at the beginning of the week [stock from Sunday lunch's chicken, peeling and preparing vegetables, watching over pot etc], it's a warm and welcoming interlude in the course of a day's gentle work.
Being a natural dilettante, though, even with minimal distraction, my limited concentration wavers as the natural light begins to wane. Charlie, our Jack Russell, will not let me ignore him indefinitely. He always senses when I am beginning to tire of my labours and knows exactly how to redirect my attentions. Even if I wanted to continue writing, I couldn't. No matter what the weather, we have to head off to the riverbank and the playground where his fellow canine chums hang out. Like teenagers in jeans and sloppy sweatshirts with hoods, dogs are pack animals, for sure. The upside of being a dog 'mum' for me is that I get to meet other owners, but more importantly, that I have become much more acutely aware of the miniscule daily changes of a single season.
There is always something new to see, like a secret cosmic message, which presages the change to come. January, more than any other month, keeps itself to itself and hides its hidden treasures, like a pirate's secret map. You know that there are hidden gems, but you have to search very hard to find them. Along the lane at Bardies, one of the greatest joys of the whole year is to see the tiny, delicate, wild snowdrop bulbs pop their heads up into the cold January air. They are so fragile, their flowers can be destroyed in minutes by a hailstorm or vicious downpour. As quickly as they come up, so they disappear for the rest of the year, when they are only sleeping. They have been there for generations and their brief sojourns above ground must have warmed the hearts of so many before us.
I am sad because this year I think I shall miss them. The heavy snowfalls and perishing cold in the UK has made travelling parlous. Since we set off for Bardies on 17th December, and wrecked the car in the snow in the process, the British weather map has been more akin to an Alpine one. With airports closed on a weekly basis and Eurostar regularly getting stuck in the tunnel, for the first time that I can remember, I haven't been down to my beloved Bardies in January with my laptop in tow. Post the hard work and chaos of Christmas, I have always relished starting my year's work off with time to myself, and there is nowhere in this world more conducive to creativity than Bardies [but, hey, I'm biased!]. Tucked up in the warm, with my music, books and computer for company, I need for nothing. I could, and would, hibernate there all winter if there were no other demands on my time.
In this semi-hibernation mode, I began to muse on how other non-employees like me work. Whenever I read an obituary, I am always taken aback by how prolific so many talented people have been. It similarly occurs to me, though, that for many people maybe it just seems to be so. I heard the supremely gifted Jennifer Saunders saying on the radio the other day that she had been known to dictate new material to her young daughters, who wrote it all down in pencil and crayon, in the car on the way to a script deadline meeting. Over a whole lifetime, it matters less how much you produce as the quality of it when you finally get round to doing it. Surely for all of us, our natural instinct is to sleep the winter away?
As the scholarly Graham Robb says in his wonderful book, 'The Discovery of France', that men and women who did almost nothing for a large part of the year tend not to figure prominently in history books. "The tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. Entire Pyrenean villages of wood, like Bareges on the western side of the Col du Tourmalet, were abandoned to the snow and reclaimed from the avalanches in late spring. Other populations in the Alps and the Pyrenees simply entombed themselves until March or April, with a hay-loft above, a stable to one side and the mountain slope behind." According to a geographer writing in 1909, he cites, "the inhabitants re-emerge in spring, dishevelled and anaemic". He goes on to say that human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity, since lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies.
Nineteenth century economists and bureaucrats were appalled at such idleness and, just like today, compared France's more leisurely approach to productivity to the capitalistic and competitive economy of Britain. They were even more horrified by the troglodytic dwellings of the Dordogne, the Tarn, the Loire Valley, and the limestone and sandstone belt that stretches from the Ardennes to Alsace. Thousands of people disappeared into cliff faces, caves, chalkpits or quarries dug deep below the vineyards for months on end. In Arras and other Flanders towns, one third of the population lived in 'boves', from an old French word for 'cavern', in whole cities carved into medieval quarries. Their priority was survival, not economic growth, and the impetus for trade remained social rather than economic. "Most felt safer cocooned in idleness," says Graham Robb.
Sitting here in Salisbury on a cold, snowy January night, I can see their point. With no light, power or heat, and almost no food to sustain them, they were totally at the mercy of the elements. Life underground in the sleep-inducing gloom was infinitely preferable to the hardships above. Long nights and lazy days became the norm and, by all accounts, remained so until well into the twentieth century. It seems to me to have been a much better life than that of the average British mill worker and it goes a long way towards explaining our different cultural and economic heritages. Who knows, the EU Working Time Directive may have its roots in such ancient custom and practice.
So, for now, I am making the most of this time. Gone are the usual stresses and strains and demands on my time, for the snow has given us all a sense of perspective. Things that we would have loved to have done, we have been forced, along with our cars, to abandon. Work is enjoyable because it is uninterrupted by extraneous, and usually unnecessary, considerations. Life evolves into a rhythm and we seek out and find our inner selves in the process. I would say, 'Long may it last', but I also know that its true appeal lies in its temporariness. Spring will come, gradually, and these long nights and lazy days will be no more. For then I will look back with pleasure at my uninhibited slothfulness, as I rush round to catch up with everything that must be done, and for which there is no time to wait.
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