Best Intentions: An essay for the time of year, by Cork author Billy O'Callaghan
It was so cold in Cork in January 1987 that the Lough froze over. 'Trying to avoid a snowball, I lost my footing and landed on my face on the road.' Picture: Irish Examiner Archive
The snow was bad in Cork back in January 1987. I remember Liverpool, my obsession then and to some extent still, playing Luton Town with an orange football on a snow-clad plastic pitch at Kenilworth Road in an interminable third round FA Cup tie that went to two replays before anyone could bother to score.
Even more painfully, the following morning, a Monday, with the schools wonderfully shut, I fell while playing outside and broke my nose. Trying to avoid a snowball, I lost my footing and landed on my face on the road. I hadn't long since turned twelve, and I remember a sound like a firework that must only have gone off in my head but which felt loud enough for the whole of Douglas village to hear. On my list of years to forget, that's in the running, and until this time last year it was very much the one to beat.
For me, winter always feels that much more bearable once the Solstice is behind us. Initially the difference seems minimal, and it can take weeks – especially if there's something overcast about the weather – for the adjustment within the mechanics of the days to reveal itself, but just knowing the wheels of the year are turning in the right direction and have the cogs doing their utmost grinding makes all the difference. Looking out at half-five or six o'clock and seeing a blue patch of sky or a sifting of peppery light instead of dismal dark, or waking of a morning to a bit of brightness, even of the toned down variety, is enough to lift the heart.
Christmas probably exists for other reasons too, and it is a time I always enjoy, mainly for how it prompts memories of even better Christmases gone by, but I also can't help but feel that it's there, as much as anything, to ease some of the weight of what would otherwise feel like wall-to-wall night. We get a stretch either side of the year's lowest ebb brightened by layers of gleaming tinsel, twinkling fairy lights and candles burning in windows, and if that's not enough to stir the spirit and bring a bit of cheer and goodwill then there's usually the drop of something that'll get a nice bit of a fire going inside.
And then, all too soon almost, it's over, and what has been packed in, the deep, gluttonous overindulging, starts to hang heavy, especially if, as I have, you've reached an age of certain comfort. With a fresh year filling the near horizon, and with the best intentions in the world, the inevitable promises are made. They consist of the usual fare, more delusion than resolution but well meant, and that, too, is a tradition in itself. Citing these promises takes no great stretch of the imagination, because one size fits all. So, take your pick from:
- The giving up of habits that ought never to have been taken on in the first place, and wouldn't have been, if they hadn't offered so much pleasure to the flesh and the taste buds.
- The determination towards exercising, morning or evening walks for the less devoted but for the rest, gyms, perish the thought (is there a more horrendous word in the dictionary than “treadmill”? Well, yes, but that one is surely on a shortlist), launching ourselves full-blooded at it as if the suffering were something blessed, our teeth-clenched intensity bordering almost on religious fervour the first few days until the back goes out or a muscle is pulled or we decide that the rain is sent from on high, in more ways than one, as a warning worth heeding.
- And, last but never least, the wishful notion of bettering ourselves in more enlightened ways, by setting our reading aims to the lofty heights of Ulysses, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina or the Shakespeare plays, or opening ourselves to “serious” poetry, art and opera.
One year, I decided that I ought to learn a language and of course opted for Chinese, I who left school with little more Irish in my repertoire than “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas, máis é do thoil é” – rarely if ever even making a question of it, since at the point of its uttering the emergency tended to rule out any option on the teacher's part of a negative response. Needless to say, the Chinese didn't take with me. What few words and phrases I did manage to pick up are the same few I know in other languages, the ones which might be useful in their way but are generally considered unrepeatable in polite company.
There's a point, not quite fixed on a calendar but generally found to be a week or two into the new year – or, if you happen to be possessed of particularly mighty willpower, a week or two later again – when even the most vehemently uttered vows lose the last fragment of their appeal.
When you've read the first hundred pages of War and Peace and realise that not only have you absolutely no idea who anybody is, you're also still only about a fourteenth of the way in; or when you cry yourself to sleep most nights from the pain in your shins because the hills around where you live mean nothing to your increasingly demanding Fitbit; or when the shape of a perfectly pulled pint of Beamish or a fine big slab of Cadbury's Golden Crisp is waiting for you in the dark every time you shut your eyes, you begin to understand what matters most to you and what doesn't.
Life is for living and there are surely better ways to spend the time allotted to you than in sufferance. If the cost of that is an extra inch or two at the waist then, just maybe, such failure is a price worth paying.
Resolutions must be some odd amalgam of Catholic guilt and admirable – even when wildly misplaced – optimism. We make them year after year and the only easy thing about them is how easily they can be broken. Fortunately, by the time that happens, we're ready for it.
Trying to look on the bright side of what, by mid to late January or, if we should be so lucky, February, remains a still pretty dreary stretch of the year, we can tell ourselves that even the few weeks (or days for the most pathetic among us) we've managed to toe the line will have served us well, since in that time we must have lost a good half a pound at least, we're surely breathing more freely, our livers can only thank us for forging that small but so-badly-needed window of recovery, and the time we've given Chinese or Spanish or Italian will have been enough for the very best of the swear words to stick.
This January, after the year we've all put down, a year that twelve months back would have seemed like the most fanciful science fiction, I am advocating that we forego the idea of resolutions. Instead, I am all for jotting down my list of hopes.
I won't go mad with wishes for Booker Prizes or Lotto jackpots. Just getting back some of the things we'd all so casually taken for granted will suffice: being able to meet friends for a pint; getting on a bus and chatting to the person next to me; shaking hands (and not having to wash them every five minutes); visiting; attending concerts and matches again, and funerals, too; having the chance to travel. If the coming months grants us what used to count as normality then it'll feel as if Santy has moved Christmas, and if I am a bit more cuddly by the time this rolls around then that's a price I'm willing to pay.
