To he who waits, it’s a long road that has no turning, the only constant in the universe is change………..
Are you ready to hit me yet?*
Yes it has been a very annoying year. But on Tuesday it will be December.
December of 2020
This year has been a bit like those pre-adolescence years. Do you remember waiting for something to happen while being bossed around by people you had lost all respect for, straining to see what everyone else was doing, and with a deep seated sense of complete and total inadequacy? And these were what everyone was calling the happiest years of your life? Yeh, right, thanks.
I don’t for a minute think that as soon as the clock points to 2021, we’re in the clear.
In fact we’ve decided not to see the grandchildren, who I haven’t seen since last Christmas. This is a bit dreadful, for those of us who came from orphanages not to see the only real relatives you’ve got for over a year is awful. But they are only little – how can I share the same infective airspace and not hug them?
I propose to mend the situation by a personal reversal of the calendar changes of 1750.
As you do.
The changes were suggested to deal with what was referred to in Parliament as ‘diverse inconveniences.’ Mostly that Europe and Scotland began a new year on January 1st but England began it on March 25th. The tax year has got stuck and still follows the Julian calendar which was named after actual Julius Caesar, who instigated it. The problem with this was the state of astronomy at the time which, rather like the maths of so many of us, made the length of a year more of a ‘figure in the region of’ than accurate. Every now and then people would have to get up in the middle of the night or have Thursday on a Tuesday, no one had half a day off and the weekend hadn’t been invented.
To put the whole mess right eleven days were removed from the calendar in the following year, leading to riots by people who thought they had been robbed of eleven days and would at the very least prematurely age or miss their flight to Benidorm. But eventually the system we have now, with a leap year extra day and the year beginning on January 1st everywhere, was adopted, after much muttering in the ranks.
But here Chez Jane I am suggesting we stick with the awful 2020 in our heads until pre-eighteenth century new year.
Then the people who are going to get Covid from three other households (or whatever the rules are when we get there) will have got it and recovered, or not. A vaccine will be under way world wide and a real new year of hope and optimism can begin with the spring flowers, the eggs, the bunny rabbits, the return of the sun and people running through the meadow towards each other eating chocolate bars.
Locked down in the freezing cold, sneezing and wondering what you’ve got, with zero money because you spent it all making up for deficiencies and hips the size of a small county, is not the way to make a new beginning.
Waiting till the bad stuff is really over is the way to make a new beginning.
I should know, I have waited two years mainly in the bathroom, with intestinal adhesions. By the time I get my eyes sorted I will have waited over a year with poor vision. I waited eighteen months in a half-built house. I have waited ten years for the OH to acknowledge that he may have a problem.
I am good at waiting.
Waiting is not the easy option. Gardeners are well disposed to wait. No seed ever sprouted that was regularly dug up to see how it was doing.
I am going to wait out Christmas and old new year. I am going to wait for a personal new year, at a date later to be announced, post vaccination.
Because everything comes to she who waits and the impatience cultivated by apps, the web, and the want it all and want it now mentality we have all been guilty of, has turned out to be the croc of fools gold I always thought it was.
Slow and steady wins the human race.
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* Now are you ready to hit me?