Well, one reason might be that it's very difficult to sum it all up. I like neatness, consistency, pithy ways of rounding things off to give the illusion of design. 2014 doesn't exactly feel like the tidiest of years, there's no buzzword or phrase that captures it, other than perhaps following everyone else and calling it the Year of the Selfie... but Future Historians can mull over the worth of that moniker. I only ever took one selfie and it wasn't in this year.
An untidy year then? Perhaps. It definitely started with a lot of uncertainty...
"Later, the rain lashed against my bedroom window and the wind howled and buffeted and whipped through the trees. The year was off to a stormy start. It's a scary place, the top of the year. I went to bed feeling as though I was precariously perched with the unknown stretching before me, vast and terrible, kind and wonderful and every other permutation of possibilities."
- New Year's Eve, 1/1/14
"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."
- Vertigo, 2/1/14
Thinking about it now, vertigo, a fear of falling, being 'precariously perched' ... it all seems quite apt. I didn't know at that stage that things were unfolding elsewhere. As January yawned open, I quietly got on with figuring out what I'm supposed to be doing, painting the conservatory, speculating about the artwork in the waiting room at the dentist's. Oh and figuring out that travel companies invented Blue Monday...
"It's supposed to be the most depressing day of the year, Blue Monday. It's a complicated calculation involving nebulous factors like Time Since Christmas, Debt Incurred, Weather and Motivation Level...
... I did a little research and guess what? Blue Monday was invented by a travel company! Yup, suddenly it all fits together. You've seen the ads: sandy white beaches, flowing cotton, impossibly blue skies and sunsets over wine glasses..."
- Blue Monday, 20/1/14
Of course it wasn't much longer after that that I fell into the trap myself and was dreaming about Sorrento at my desk. Plus then I kept getting job adverts for Gibraltar, Bulgaria and holiday emails from Thomas Cook trying to send me all over the place! They know what they're up to, these people.
By the time February rolled round, much of the country was underwater thanks to seasonal flooding. It meant that rather than my annual trip to a London museum, I had to make do with the Bayeux Tapestry copy that's hidden on the first floor of Reading Museum. Ukraine erupted into civil war, flumbook bought WhatsApp for $19bn and I wrote poems about flying away. Oh, and I turned 36, which I definitely don't want to dwell on too much, but seemed to celebrate nonetheless by getting on the wrong side of a colleague at a lunchtime quiz.
"Ferdinand, I'm going to have to overrule you," I said, scratching out the word Verona on the answer sheet. Ferdinand was adamant that Vivaldi was born in Verona. He protested that he, a well-travelled German and connoisseur of European culture, had lived in Italy for eleven years and that Verona was a well known hot-spot for classical music."
- Two Gentlemen and Verona, 13/2/14
Future Me thinks I was a bit pompous. I did later become friends with Ferdinand. Unfortunately he was made redundant a few months later, presumably to resume his exotic travels across Europe. Was he right about Vivaldi? Well, no. Still, it's water under the bridge.
Oh, speaking of exotic travellers, in March, when the floods had subsided, I made it to London for an excellent trip to the National Gallery.
"There's something about fine art that resonates in a uniquely personal way when you see it. I stood inches from paintings by Cezanne, Constable, Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissaro, Canaletto, Suerat, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Holbein and many others. I really felt it. It was as though I was wandering through the richest, most sumptuous of grand halls, where old masters called out to me..."
- Exotic Travellers with Paintbrushes, 25/3/14
As April kicked in, the weather started to change and rainy wintry days turned into the rainbow season, and then the first buds of summer. I wrote a poem called Today, and then (partly inspired by the weather) another one called Cathedrals. April also brought the hay fever season with it, a plague that lasted until the beginning of July.
"My eyes are red, my throat is sore and my nose feels like it's some sort of burning beacon: a landing strip for any wayward pollen that might be circumnavigating the air conditioning system."
- Pollen Diaries: Part 1, 15/4/14
You know, so far I'm not sure it counts as an untidy year, or even an eventful one. There were other things going on at the time, which were hurtling towards me - but I didn't know about them. Apart from sneezing, May was about the fun day (it rained), insomnia (I didn't sleep) and holding the fort while the Intrepids toured their way around the Dorset coast...
"This, I imagine, is what life would be like if I did live on my own - a mixed bag of beautiful solitude and quiet boredom. It won't be long either, before I slip into doing zany things like wearing the oven gloves as slippers or singing Christmas carols into the tumble dryer..."
- Home Alone, 26/5/14
I didn't do either of those things. Honest. Then, as June began and hay fever made a mess of me in the mornings, the thrill and excitement of the World Cup gripped the nation. Four weeks of wall-to-wall footy-talk and pessimism about England. I remember I watched Nigeria v Iran and wanted to end it all.
"You tend to meet two types of people around this time of year. Broadly speaking, they are: people who love football, understand the nuances and tensions, the drama, the hope, the despair and sheer atmosphere of it, and then people who don't. This second group of people grab their remote-controls and zap the TV over to soap operas, history documentaries, the shopping channel, anything except the flipping football."
- A Game of Two Halves, 18/6/14
I remember thinking of it like stones in ponds, sending ripples across the flat smooth water like a tidal wave of trouble. It was a bit naive, that, as a simile. It turned out that one of my friends had been having an affair with someone for six months and it had all come to light. I was devastated, betrayed, afraid, paralysed with shock. At the time it did feel like the world had been sent into a topsy-turvy spin, as though gravity had been switched off, or as though a meteor had pounded the earth like a stone. It's not my business to talk about what's happened since, other than how it affected me, but I have to include it in 2014; it almost feels like a fulcrum around which the rest of the year revolves. The situation refuses to settle in my mind, churning and burning like a toxic cloud of woe. It was more a radioactive detonation than a stone in a pond, I think. There is always fallout.
The sadness was only exacerbated with the news that my sister had left my brother-in-law in early July to go and live with someone else. I wrote about that in Stones in Ponds. That's also a real mess, that one, still rumbling round and still very difficult, with lies and counter-lies and all sorts of acrimony. That family too, my family, won't be easily or quickly repaired.
You can imagine, I was feeling quite shell-shocked in July. But in every difficulty, there's always room for hope to sneak through. And I don't think either of those disasters have reached the end of the tale just yet.
Like all the best stories, I'm saving the second half of the 2014 review of the year for the next post, so as the curtains draw shut and the house lights are raised, make sure you charge your glasses, grab an ice-cream and if you can contain your excitement, don't forget to tune in after the break...
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