‘I hate this time of year’

Photo credit: Andrew Rumsey

This, from a person I have met a handful of times, our dogs nosing each other at our feet. It’s a bright sunny afternoon, tropical by Plymouth standards, i.e., not hosing with rain. ‘I’m deciding if we need the windows done.’ They look great to me, I say. ‘The back,’ she says, ‘they’re filthy.’ She says it again: ‘I hate this time of year,’ and walks off down the road.

It’s nothing I haven’t heard myself say over the years. Along with: ‘I can’t wait for Christmas to be over’, ‘I’ve got a terrible week this week’, ‘At least I’m not being shot at’, and ‘I had a perfectly happy childhood.’ I made a vow some time ago not to use these frames to describe my experience because, and I have learned this the bitterly hard way, they do not describe who I am and what is happening now.

What is happening now is that I am really, really tired, and have a heavy cold. But Tatty has got the heating to work and we are watching a favourite police procedural on the telly. What is also happening is that is it now hosing with rain. Some poems were rejected. But another was accepted. So it goes. It is complicated.

Also not quite happening now but in my recent memory of what I did hear myself calling ‘a really terrible week’ (so much for consistency), I have listened to talks and podcasts on the cheery subjects of what might happen if Trump wins the 2024 US election and the climate collapse. In the same time-span, I re-re-read this article on James Schuyler and came across this one, on his line breaks, for the first time. These things do not distract me from Trump and climate collapse, nor do they ‘sweeten the pill’ of the realities of those things. I’m learning (very slowly) that not everything is binary. More likely, things are both/and: rejection/acceptance; sunshine/rain; Trump/James Schuyler’s line breaks.

How can I honestly say it has been a terrible week, that I hate this time of year?

With thanks to Andrew Rumsey, and everyone at the Caravan of Love, Greenbelt Festival.