Remarkable how often I've seen complaints about 'November' bandied about lately – a sort of automatic disparagement, comments made that assume we all hate this month. Although I don't enjoy winter weather, I always thought of November as a somehow noble (ennobled, ennobling?), rather dignified, austere kind of month; there is a seriousness about it, a definite quality that makes it one of the few winter months in no doubt about its own nature.
November is, perhaps, the only winter month that doesn't cover itself up with the illusion of being about something else. On the council of the winter months, it is the one whose decisions are always clear, whose definitions of good and bad always predictable. (Unlike December, wearing clothes too bright and too loud for its coloring, or listless, indecisive January; or even February, with its still-born illusions of renewal.)
November is different here than where I grew up: although it only comes at the end of the month, Thanksgiving, the beginning of the rather overwhelming, familial, convivial American holiday season, transforms the whole month in the US. (I can't remember whether Canada has a Thanksgiving of some kind – don't they hold one a week earlier, a week later? – ah, the Wikipedia tells me theirs is in mid-October, which must entirely change its nature.)
Although a snowy winter is practically unknown here, even in the northern corner of England, the days do, of course, radically shorten – I have a widget on my computer that details exactly how short they get, and we are now down to a day about eight hours and fifteen minutes long. At its shortest it will go down to about seven hours, at which point the day will feel vanishingly strange to those of us who didn't grow up here. (So I guess I should call this: to drive the dark winter away.)
***
Today was another wasted day; after the strange ups and downs of the past week, I'm in what feels like more normal health, but was so exhausted on Thursday that I collapsed early that evening into bed, and Friday was largely spent sleeping.
I'd answered a few e-mails, staving off administrative messes, and tried to do some birthday planning – my fiftieth is soon, and I share the time of year with friends who are reaching forty and forty-five respectively; so it is being labeled our one-hundred-thirty-fifth, and it would be rather silly to let it pass without some celebration. (Especially because, when you're single and far from extensive family/friend connections, it is dangerous not to plan ahead for some sort of marking of birthdays and holidays – the day can come and go almost without a ripple, only leaving in its wake a rather edgy awareness of how lonely, how unimportant, one has become. A good reason to be straight, married, and part of a large family, I suppose.)
I also tried to arrange some sort of winter trip – the agency linked to the university advertised seriously cheap flights to North America, including Washington and New York, where my family lives; of course it turned out that the advertisement had taken nearly a week to reach me, and anything affordable was already long gone. But it impelled me back to the Easyjet and Ryanair sites to try and find some place warm to go in January – Palermo looks most plausible, but we'll see. (It's frustrating to try to really get warm in winter, in Europe – you have to go a real distance, generally out of the range of the cheap flights – even southern Italy and Spain are only somewhat less cold than here, as proved by last year's Xmas trip to Rome.)
But most of the day was spent here, on the sofa, fairly groggy, and frankly increasingly smelly. My main vow was a shower, and one that included some sort of scalp oil treatment; it didn't happen, and I ate again, and slept again, and then it was late at night. But there's an advantage to living alone – even though you don't have anyone else keeping you alert ('Were you going to work on that article today?', 'Don't you think you should get up?'), you can do pretty much what you please in the middle of the night.
At around 4 am, I woke up; by about 5 am, I had pushed myself out onto the floor, threw the blanket in the washing machine (no spin, that would be too obnoxiously noisy for the neighbors), and shaved. Rich, oily cream in my hair: I love the way salts and oils have come back into style, it gives an antique, almost raw strength to bathing – it is the difference between pouring some smooth, opalescent compound, full of poly-thises and methyl-thats, from a plastic bottle, as opposed to the richness of spices, of handfuls of salt in the bath, of heavy oils on the skin.
The work, the hammering away at the body, at my surroundings, pulls me back in the metaphorical calendar of my body's own year: after all, being fifty should represent, not November, but let's say October at the most, red leaves and pumpkins and fresh days. In any case, I am lucky in my genetic makeup: perhaps one reason I fret so much about going to the gym, about losing weight, is (aside from simply being a gay man, of course) the intuitive knowledge that, with more work, I could move the calendar of my body back to mid-September, or even that first week of September, just after the sun starts to drop: not an unpleasant time of year.
It is now nearly 7 am: that sunrise is less than an hour away – I'll sleep again and wake later, hopefully cleansed as powerfully as in some sort of Vedic ritual, as though I'd dedicated myself to the gods who would help me finish the writing that I need to do, rich with oils, heavy with incense.
[The photograph, by Markus Puustinen, is called 'Last Snowfall'.]
Comments