15 December 2016
Spring into Spring
The ides: an idea?
by J.R.Thomas
“Now is the winter of our discontent…” wrote that chap from Stratford on Avon. He was brooding on political success of course, but winter discontent strikes a deep chord with us all in this dark misty damp island, swept by the occasional dramatically violent westerly but more often just encased in grey gloom for three or four months each winter. The image of winter in the British Isles, as exemplified in endless Christmas cards and TV specials is of deep snow, crisply frosted, with cheerful robins perched on abandoned garden forks and rosy cheeked children hurling the white stuff at each other.
The reality though is discontent indeed, gloomy darkness and endless greyness, light grey for about eight hours and dark grey for twelve, and fifty sorts of rain, from slush to dripping mist. So we put the Christmas decorations up at the end of November in an attempt to alleviate the gloom. And if the decorations are up, then we all have to get into the party spirit of course; the lunching and dining and drinking begins, the Christmas music blasts out as the money is sucked with ever hastening speed from our credit card accounts, massed phalanxes of Santa Clauses push us off pavements as they jog past on some charity fund raiser, and by the time Christmas actually arrives we are all so exhausted and dyspeptic that it is utterly wasted on us.
You may be thinking your correspondent is reaching peak dyspepsia early this year, but no; like the red suited beardie I seek only to bring you cheer. And a brilliant idea.
We can’t do much about Christmas, it has long become pretty much a lost cause to commerce and over indulgence (congratulations to those who can avoid all that and celebrate, fresh and unsullied by the forces of money, on Christmas Day). But maybe we could do a bit of refocussing and create a new and valid reason for celebration, and mark something special with the honour it deserves.
Let us properly celebrate New Year. We finally collapse with relief on the night of Boxing Day, a whole year’s weight loss reversed in 20 days of over indulgence, and then, before we can even take stock and clear up the mess, it is New Year’s Eve. Now that ought to be a good cause for celebration. It is universal, non-sectarian, and there is a real cause for it, the approach of the beginning of the new year, the beginning of the cycle of renewal and regrowth. But we cannot do it justice; exhaustion and excess make New Year’s Eve a marathon to be endured, a race in which we stagger over the finish line with a stumbling chorus of Auld Lang’s Syne, hoping that by half past midnight it will all be over and we can groan our way to bed, ready for one more day of dozing and bracing walking (actually reluctant puddle jumping in the grey gloom) before we reapply our noses to the grindstone. The Scots used to have the right idea; Christmas a relatively modest affair of proper Presbyterian rectitude with much time spent in the kirk and not too much at table, but with the party deferred to a week later at Hogmanay. Then the whisky is broached, the black bun sliced, and the bagpipes allowed unfettered assault on the eardrums. On New Year’s morning the whole of Scotland was silent, from Morningside to the Gorbals, and on up to Lochinver and the Outer Hebrides. Scotland was sleeping it off, a one night mass all nation party, which had to pretty much do it until the next 31st December. Now, even the Scots have succumbed to the lure of Christmas flashiness and their one night is extended to a month and more, like everywhere else.
So let’s deal with this. Let’s be radical. Let’s move New Year. Instead of making it that last tortuous event in an overextended season, move it to the 1st of March, with the party on the last night of February. So many factors commend themselves in such a proposal – most of all, that New Year escapes from the giant brooding shadow of Christmas and becomes once more a proper celebration in its own right. And it will truly be the beginning of spring. Well, maybe not quite in Scotland and places north; so as a further suggestion, perhaps we could be really bold and go fifteen days later, for the Ides of March as our New Year. It is a date of celebration even older than Christmas and for centuries effectively the beginning of the Roman new year; there was that unpleasant business with Julius Caesar of course, but long forgotten now, surely. And even that is nicely symbolic; old tyrant dead, roll on new one.
So let’s celebrate the New Year at the point at which the new year really begins, with life renewing itself, the first and brightest flowers appearing, the trees starting to wear that sheen of so many variants of green, lambs gambolling in the meadows and onto our new New Year’s plates, with fresh green mint sauce from the garden and winter aged redcurrant sauce (very symbolic). Followed, of course, by rhubarb crumble from the finest forced rhubarb with West Country cream from cows released to the new grass. What a feast that would be, so much better than dry turkey and really weird chestnut stuffing and over rich Christmas pudding. Later, we can process outside to mild temperatures, no need to don ten layers of protective clobber, and enjoy a proper long New Year’s Day walk in the longer and gentler light of early spring. The gloomy grey skies will have broken to fresh blue, and optimism will abound, lifting us from that January and February depression. Never mind that the winter food stores are depleted, New Year becomes the equivalent of Harvest Festival; if that is all about safely gathering in, New Year becomes a reminder that this is when we must prepare to sow and plant. And invest. Here is yet another good reason for moving the beginning of the year – so many business activities end on 31st December, so many financial end of year things have to be done at a time when we are all satiated and jaded, our energies sapped by port, our judgements clouded by plum pudding. But if we can deal with all that at the end of February – or mid-March if you prefer – then we shall be sentient and alert as we rule off the old year’s business and eager and enterprising as we start the new year’s endeavours.
‘Now is the winter of our discontent…
… made glorious summer by this son of York’
was what that Midland writer chap went on to say. If you substitute “spring” for summer the sentiment is exactly right. Away with January 1st. Bring on the Ides of March!
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