VERTIGO

It's that toppling feeling. New Year's Day had it, with its monsoon rains and gale-force winds. I felt like I spent the day falling over. Today, the first real day of January carried it too: that terrifying feeling of dizziness at the top of the year.

The sky was blue, crisp and cold. A low sun winked through the trees and glistened upon the bulging lake by my office. It was freezing. I watched my breath expand and disappear in the freezing air, then buried my nose in my scarf.

It's the not-knowing that makes it terrifying. The uncertainty of this year is so vast and unpredictable, it's impossible to know where to begin to calculate it, or even whether I should. It is unknowable and unknown. And that gives me vertigo.

I have made one decision though. There is one thing at least that I'm chalking up as a New Year's Resolution, even as the disapproval of my peers is gathering. I'm giving up facebook.

What? You can't do that! Yeah I can. See, I want to remember the days when you made an effort to find out what your friends were up to. I want to be spared the terrible voyeurism of watching other people's opinions unfold from behind their computers; I want to see the glint in their eyes when they're being cheeky or sarcastic, I want to light up when they tell me their big news (because it is the first time I've heard it and I don't have to pretend that it's the first time I've heard it), and I want to be free of the need to know what everyone is up to.

The need to know. How has that happened? We peep into each other's lives, making a picture out of snapshot statuses and stolen moments from digital cameras. We conclude with a wry smile that they're depressed, excited, deluded, political, naive, pretentious, stubborn, stupid, clever, cynical, odd... or is that just me that does that? Thank goodness, says my subconscious, scrolling through my newsfeed and wiping its furrowed brow, that I'm not like that.

Oho, Matt. That's a tick in the deluded box for a start. Well not any more it's not. I've removed myself from the equation; I've stepped into the brave new world of 2006...ish. Alright, I'll still be on Twitter, but somehow that feels a little different. I feel more in control of my feed there, and the character limit seems to restrict much of the nonsense that bothers me. 

So, what has all that got to do with vertigo, with the head-spinning discomfort of early January? Well I can see already that this 'brave new world' of glorious isolation from my 493 acquaintances and friends... might also be a bit lonely. And that scares me. I have a fear of loneliness that runs deeper than I have time to explain. However, the fact that I've decided to do this despite that fear, says a lot about how I feel about  facebook, I think. My apologies if you sent me a message. It will be a while before I get it.

I watched the swans gliding across the lake, leaving long arced ripples that caught the glimmer of the sunlight. It takes a lot of work to look that elegant. Underneath the smooth, silky water, their scaly reptilian legs would certainly have been furiously peddling. It's OK then, I thought to myself, if nobody can see the effort. I turned and headed indoors.