Today is the first day of February - the perfect time to fortify my New Year’s Resolutions. Or perhaps to edit them, as the glowing optimism of December has dimmed somewhat.
I am a big fan of resolve and resolving. If you read my blog about Woody Guthrie’s wonderful New Year’s Rulin’s, then you will already know this. If you didn’t, then read it now - not only for my vanity, but because I think Guthrie's 33 commandments are Mount Sinaian in their sagacity. Yeeah I just made up that word, ‘Sinaian’. A coinage! And so early in the year!
I know it sounds like I may have made up 'sagacity’ too. But I didn’t. I wish I did - what a humdinger of a word.
Sagacity is 'the quality of being sagacious’* – I have just decided that my tip-top February resolution is to be sagacious AT ALL TIMES.
Person A (let’s call him Englebert, just for fun): 'Where’s Katya?'
Person B (Mildred, same reason): 'Oh, she’s just over there, being sagacious, like usual.'
Leaving my soon-to-be perpetual sagaciousness aside, let me tell you why I hate January. That took a negative turn quickly didn’t it? Quick! Look at this kitten falling down!
Despite my unabashed love of resolutions (I love resolutions almost as much as sticky buns, and that is really saying something) and the fact that they should be the very mechanism to bring about positive change, they somehow have a way of infusing January with misery. It seems to me that in January, everyone feels cold, fat and an irrefutable non-piano-virtuoso-linguist-zen-master.
I shan’t pretend that December didn’t see me making overzealous resolutions:
Cutting down on meat - though I am an unrepentant carnivore, this has been a moderate success
Stretching every day before breakfast - obviously an unmitigated failure. It takes a stronger will than mine to resist the siren song of toast & marmite and/or Special K.
Growing fingernails as long as my arms - I don’t think I’ve seen a single friend this month without shrieking “Look! Talons!!” and wiggling my paws at them. That’s not to say I have succeeded, it’s just my new 'cool’ way of saying hello.
But January is too cold, too lean, and too sober (not for me, although there is nothing more sobering than people expatiating on their decision to plump for a lemonade) to try and bring about self-flagellating change.
When you are cold to your bones, you need more fat on them, more brandy, and more lie-ins with a fleecy blanket.
With this is mind, I wanted to share two poems with you - don’t worry, I didn’t write them.
They are actually both in an anthology called 101 Poems To Get You Through The Day (And Night) edited by Daisy Goodwin: a restorative collection, and one of my most treasured books. My Grandma gave me this book eleven birthdays ago, and it has been propped up on the various bookshelves of every bedroom I’ve lived in since then. I think that’s ten.
The first one is called Song on Being Too Lazy to Get Up, by Shao Yung (and translated by Burton Watson). If staying in bed for an extra 15 minutes, give or take, is OK for 11th Century Philosophers, then it is a-OK by me.
Half remembering, yet not remembering, just waked up from a dream;
almost sad, but not sad, a time when I’m feeling lazy,
hug the covers, lie on my side, not wanting to get up yet –
beyond the blinds, falling petals fly by in tangled flurries.
How beautiful is that?
Not rhetorical. The answer is Very. Extremely. Overwhelmingly.
And the second poem is Against Dieting, by Blake Morrison. I love this poem so much I would almost go so far as to hand over my soon-to-be-title of Chief Sage to Blake Morrison. I think it’s an excellent (Gin &) Tonic for one of January’s many cruelties - the world alliance that, for reasons unfathomable to me, got together and decided to make women feel bad about their loveliest squidgy bits.
I decree (as soon-to-be Chief Sage - this is happening, people): take Morrison’s advice, and have a sticky bun. Or at the very least, share one with me.
Please, darling, no more diets.
I’ve read the books on why it’s
good for one’s esteem.
I’ve watched you jogging lanes and pounding treadmills.
I’ve even shed some kilos of my own.
But enough. What are love handles
between friends? For half a stone
it isn’t worth the sweat.
I’ve had it up to here with crispbread.
I doubt the premise, too.
Try to see it from my point of view.
I want not less but more of you.
So now that January is well and truly behind us, I encourage you to make like Woody Guthrie, and come up with some corkers for your February Resolutions.
*I’m sure you already knew that but it never hurts to refresh the old vocabulary. I used to go out with someone who thought that 'Resting on your Laurels’ meant sitting down, and that Laurels was a fancypants (so to speak) word for bottom.
You can bet your laurels I set him straight.
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