The old year is on the turn and ailing away into a pale evening sky. All our attempts at plotting a way of celebrating have been sent flying like skittles before the great rolling cannonball of Tier 4. The Wollaton Hall light show, New Year’s Day walk were in place until the last moment. Just after the announcement was made yesterday we received an email from the light show organisers that it was on, and a few minutes later that it wasn’t. I suppose this is typical of what food outlets, headteachers, parents, clergy etc have been dealing with all the time. We have resolved to change our bedclothes this evening, and that will be about it in terms of ceremonial. (Please don’t assume incidentally that this little enactment only takes place at midnight on New Year’s Eve.) But this seems to be enough of an acknowledgement of the ending of one blighted year as we cross over into the reality of Brexit, new variant viruses and, one day, (a Boris promise), the vaccine and near normal by Easter. We watched him last night with his strained bonhomie, the familiar nick names bestowed on his fellow speakers, and his knowledge that he knew that we knew that he knew we couldn’t trust a word he said.
It’s still very easy for us to distance ourselves from all that’s going on up here in Crich: the proliferating infections and deaths that seem to be lapping around the Derbyshire foothills. Yesterday we had a perfect winter walk in the northern reaches of the Dove valley, crunching through frozen snow and seeing a kingfisher, a startling arrow of electric blue skimming along the rollicking surface of the Dove in Morson Wood. We sat by a stream and drank coffee and ate stollen, watching the families out in the sunshine, had a bacon cob from the Hartington Farm Shop, sat on a bench by the frozen pond where the regular ducks, bewildered by the ice, were being over-fed by sympathetic humans.
New Year’s Day to me just seems to be one last gasp – a hopeless attempt to prolong festivities. Then, in the period up to Twelfth Night, the Christmas lights seem to have lost their point, the holly starts drooping and the decorations gather dust. Out go the Christmas trees leaving a trail of brown needles, where they’ll lie outside the back door until someone stumbles over them in the Spring. The days will get colder as the daylight lengthens in the evenings. At least, this is how it always used to be and I was always keen to divest myself of Christmas, submit to the January blues, get it over with and build towards Spring. I’m afraid this year it will be more TV and more snacking – two bad habits from 2020. So we must hurry up and finish the Bombay Mix and chocolate – it will take rather longer to finish the wine.
A couple of days ago we were in Aldi and two youngish men strode past me with no masks and the temerity not to quail before my glare. They were, of course, unchallenged and were almost making a show of ignoring all safety measures. We’ve all seen the type, who think because of their macho status, T-shirts in freezing weather and caps on back to front, that they are somehow immune. I was reminded of my first encounter with Chaucer back at school, The Pardoner’s Tale – long sequences of which I can still quote by heart. Plague is raging, as of course it did in 14th Century England, and three young louts set out to destroy Death. They are distracted by gold and all kill each other fighting over it. The moral of the story is the dangers of “Glotonye... luxurie” which is unfortunate as that’s all we’ve got left this year to sustain us through the rest of winter. So it will be a refill of Bombay Mix and my Lindor Assorted. I’ve been sharing these latter equally with Deirdre but just checking the hiding place to see how to spell Lindo correctly, I noticed an odd number of sweets left. So I’ve evened it out now to ensure a fair and uncontentious ending to the year.
But there’s another plan afoot. Like millions of others just two of us will sit at the dining table tonight. We’ll set out proper seasonal coasters and the best cutlery, decent wine glasses and napkins. We’ll be duplicating what all our friends and family are doing, so that’s some sort of communion. We’ll clamber up to the Tors this evening with a bottle of bubbly and watch the spread of fireworks popping off over distant Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, along the Derwent Valley, over Matlock, across the M1, peppering the night with a bit of sparkle and hope for 2021. Sharing isolation is strange, but it is sharing nevertheless.
CODA: And now I’m adding that’s what we did and that’s how it was. Fireworks whizzing and banging and then silence. We walked home, not a car, not a shout nor a cheer – just silence and that’s how it’s going to be now.
I always like to read Thomas Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’ on New Year’s Eve. It was written as the 19th Century became the 20th. This year I just like the note of hope against the odds.
The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.