Everyone hates January, or so the logic goes. Without Christmas and New Year to look forward to, January bloats to a vanishing point of endless misery. The sun turns fugitive, occasionally reappearing with a futile smudge across the sky before collapsing into the corner of the world.
Everyone wears a hangdog look. If it’s not the mental anguish of broken or tottering resolutions, it’s the physical guilt: hard penance for living off finger food and booze for weeks on end. The decorations have soured, hope has gone flat and happiness rots in the fields.
The entirely fictitious concept of ‘Blue Monday’, a 2005 marketing stunt by Sky Travel – the broadcasting disgrace’s now-defunct holiday channel – enjoys considerable credence among the reliably gullible British public. Across the UK, people inform each other with masochistic relish that the ‘most depressing day of the year’ is the third Monday in January.
But I love January. Expectations are terminally low. It is categorically impossible for January to disappoint. And the year is so young at this point that there is no pressure – not just yet – to do or achieve anything. Festive obligations recede, the calendar is mercifully uncluttered, and the days are slow and loose. No one is trying to make you go to a ‘festival’ in Victoria Park, where TikTokkers from Theydon Bois are doing their best to ruin everyone’s day.
In fact, no one bothers you at all. Family won’t visit until spring at the earliest, friends hunker down to hibernate, and throw themselves into work. The notion of spending any more time cooking than absolutely necessary is jettisoned for months.
To me, all this lends a sense of freedom and lightness to January, a month that is all possibility and potential, unburdened by creeping feelings of loss and wasted opportunity. ‘Time’s relentless melt’, as Susan Sontag put it, is still frozen solid. January is long, languid and asks nothing of you: in this it has its edge on the other months.
February deserves all the hate it gets. Barely worthy of the name ‘month’, February is an utter irrelevance. What is March? It used to be the first among months, named for the Roman god of war. March was all glory: the season of kings and conquerors. But that was 2,000 years ago. April and May are the helpless victims of fate. As the planet warms and the ice caps melt, spring has lost its place. So long wolfed down, barely chewed, by our impatient appetite for summer, April and May will be sorely missed. May they rest in peace.
Giddy June and haughty July slip through our hands like sand. They have their charms, obviously. There’s no denying the heat and the light and the throb of human energy. But summer’s lease has all too short a date. The king of seasons slips in unnoticed – the clock starts ticking on summer while you’re still wearing your big coat. After the solstice, it’s all downhill.
