The Longest Month

I feel like I am emerging from a long, dark tunnel; January was a fairly hellish month!

To be fair, it is always a tough one. January is the one month of the year in which I do not drink booze. Not a drop.

After the excesses (and large expense) of the so-called festive season, this makes sense, although it comes at the coldest and most miserable time of year.

This year it seemed a real struggle just to keep going.

First, there was wintry weather, whose attractions soon palled after I had endured some lengthy, freezing conditions to the day-job and fallen over walking to Lewes Station.

Pavements in Lewes were an ice rink for weeks. Our hefty council tax did not seem to cover any gritting of them.


Then there were the long hours to keep everything in my life going, running on empty, flopping exhausted in front of the telly by night to watch Law and Effing Order, Dancing on Frigging Ice, and other assorted crap (how bad is ITV!)

And just when the month was almost over, there came its sting in the tail. A bastard or bastards torched our beloved camper van.

It had just returned from the garage and I was walking down the road to take it for a spin to Brighton on the last day of the month, when I was stopped in my tracks.

Some mentalist had smashed a window and set the inside ablaze in the early hours of Sunday morning. It had been gutted.

Why would anyone do that? What possible joy could they get out of it?

I am still in shock. We seem to had nothing but bad luck with that vehicle. (And most of its predecessors.)

Lazy lazy Lewes Police, of course, have applied their usual Sherlock Holmesque genius to the case, not bothering to employ forensics or, to my mind, any other form of investigation. The Keystone Cops are much maligned.

No wonder I am feeling depressed.

I suppose you need to look on the bright side.

No one was injured in the arson attack and there is a chance that the camper could be rebuilt and saved, albeit at great expense.

Admittedly, I slept very badly last night and have suddenly picked up a dreadful cold – but at least it is now February and I can drink away my sorrows!

Seriously, I have been dry for almost every January since 1985 (that’s two years on the wagon, if you add up the months), but sobriety doesn’t make your problems go away; it merely brings them sharper in the focus.

I am still grappling to publish my poetry book, still worried about my life in Lewes (especially now there’s a mad arsonist on the loose), and all the rest of it.

My grip on determining my future is lessening by the year and by the day. I often feel I have a cameo part in my own soap opera, and watching the gogglebox or the movies does not help an iota.

From the film Nowhere Boy, I learned that the young John Lennon was a violent, neurotic, thieving Scouser (admittedly I knew the latter ).

From the Mo Mowlam docu-drama on the telly, I marvelled at how someone with so little tact and such a foul mouth could make it big in public life.

I suppose she gave the Northern Irish some of the abuse they are accustomed to slinging at each other, but I am not sure how much of her misbehaviour should be attributed to her illness and how much to egotism, raw ambition, a short temper and plain bad manners.

The idea that she could ever have been Prime Minister made me laugh. But then John Prescott made it to Deputy Prime Minister. Pigs fly past the windows of Westminster every day of the week.

I digress. Apart from a couple of trips, January 2010 was a month I would rather forget.

February, I hope and pray, will be infinitely better.

But I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Oliver's Poetry