Resolution and Remembrance

"Auld Lang Syne". Mairie Campbell (version) 

 

 

"Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future."
(Fulton Outsole)

"I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done."
(Lucille Ball)

"At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent."
(Barbara Bush)

"Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne;
We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for the sake of auld lang syne."

(Robert Burns - adapted)

 

My mother said that there were always four things you could never get back in life; the harsh word after it was spoken, the stone after it was thrown, the occasion after it was missed, the time after it was lost. We set our lives to the ticking of clocks and the buzzing of alarms, dashing from one scrawled page entry to another. We tie ourselves into appointments and routines to make the most of the time we may have, then mourn the lack of time we've left ourselves simply To Be.

At New Year, we celebrate the opportunity to do all the things we've been meaning to do but  never found the time for. We immediately make lists, physically or mentally, and commit a whole new calendar to appointments and events. Yet we also encourage ourselves to look to times past; to reminisce and mourn. Memories, remembrance; this is how we mortals hold on to people, animals, places and events. It's how we hold on to ourselves in the passage of time.

I wasn't unduly surprised when a friend told me that the blog and I had missed New Year, even before the twelve days of Christmas 2014 were over. We pin our hopes and dreams on the big clock striking midnight; we link arms with inebriated strangers to call to mind sadly missed loved ones and opportunities. Then the first day of January stumbles into the second day, slips into the third and beyond... The truth is that this will be a "new" year until we embark on the next one, God willing. It's a fair assumption, based on personal experience, that the majority of resolutions earnestly embarked on ten days ago will be abandoned within weeks. Is it any less commendable if we restart the diet, finish the painting, join the gym or begin the Mandarin conversation course in May?

Mankind has not equipped itself well so far this new year: the news stories attest to revenge and aggression rather than remembrance and resolution. In the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, those who were so recently clearing away over-priced wrapping paper and cheap tinsel and vowing to give up smoking after that last packet are gone. Whoever they are, whatever they have done, their names may indeed be brought to mind for those who remain to link arms at midnight at the end of this year. And so it continues; until, one day, it stops.

All our days are numbered; the longest life may still be too short if it's heavy on regrets. I have learned at least one lesson in recent years; that time can scar as well as heal when it's mishandled. This year, I've resisted the urge to comfort myself with a list of resolutions that may become a testament of regrets. Instead, I've decided that, whatever I achieve or fail to do, getting through this year must be sweeter if I try to move forward with Grace, Grit and Gratitude in equal measure.

Instead of New Year's resolutions, I've included here some little guidelines to living well, applicable regardless of how old the year is, or indeed how old we are. I've also included a favourite version of "Auld Lang Syne", even though New Year's Eve really is old-long-since; possibly not that surprising, considering my Robbie Burns crush. Burns didn't intend to restrict his iconic anthem to one day of the year. Across the globe, it's sung on birthdays and anniversaries, at funerals and reunions. I often find myself humming it in my local Poundland (they're used to me). Which is just grand, because resolution and remembrance, like friendship and kindness, are for life, not just New Year x

 

 

;

 

 

 ("One Day Like This"  Elbow, with the BBC Concert Orchestra and choir Chantage)

 

"Drinking in the morning sun,
Blinking in the morning sun;
Shaking off a heavy one,
 Heavy like a loaded gun.
What made me behave that way,
Using words I never say?
I can only think it must be love:
Oh anyway, it's looking like a beautiful day.

 So throw those curtains wide;

One day like this a year will see me right."
(Garvey, Jupp, Potter, Potter and Turner)

 

Birds and beads, trees and tries

"Try to be better than yourself."

(William Faulkner)

Photo: Gigi, album

Whenever I take down Christmas decorations, it usually makes me feel a little deflated, as though I'm packing away cheeriness. My decorations are largely lights and garlands, and beads, berries and birds on my pot plants. I don't care for tinsel, and my own Christmas tree is a living, growing, potted one that I've nurtured and nagged for more than ten years. Everywhere that I've moved, Noel the Tree has moved too. He started his life with me in South London; a tiny, ornamental but non-specified fir from Sainsbury's. He was stuck in a red plastic flowerpot, with fake snow on his branches. Just the right size for Mum's mantelpiece, he was supposed to be thrown away by Twelfth Night, but I have a problem throwing away anything that's still even vaguely green and vibrant. When I realised he was actually rooted and growing, I decided to encourage him to be a tree. 

Re-potted several times since then and now more than six feet tall, he guards my back door. He has his own set of solar star-lights which he wears all year round, but he also has his own silver star and poinsettia garlands for Christmas. He did look rather camp at Christmas; he seems to be flourishing in Brighton's misty dampness. He's withstood being diagnosed as disposably ornamental, some mis-management from my Mum, and being hacked about by my brother-in-law who thought he was an unpruned and misguided shrub in Mum's front garden. During moves from London and then across Brighton, he's been locked in storage, knocked down basement steps and ridiculed and disrespected by various removal men. I'm an admirer of trees generally for their strength and dependable longevity; I'm extremely fond of Noel the Tree.

It didn't really take long to dismantle festivities in my little house this year. Traditionally, I try to give the last piece of the last mince pie to the birds in the back garden - feathered ones, not some bedraggled hen-party who've stumbled off the main road straight into my rose bushes, confused by Noel's twinkling. The other day, I watched for at least ten minutes while a very small robin tried valiantly to fly off with the largest piece of pastry. Luckily, Ginger the tom from next door was purring obliviously at the bottom of my stairs. 

I've never really seen a robin in a tizzy before. Every time he started to fly away with the pastry, he would drop some and start flapping and spluttering. What appeared to be a fat thrush popped down to muscle in; the robin saw him off in no uncertain terms. Eventually, he got a larger piece up to the safety of my garden table, where he pecked and gulped it down, all the while keeping a bright eye on the rest of his hoard. He then hopped down and secured another large-ish morsel, then another. Eventually, he finished all of it on his own and did a little twitchy victory-dance around the garden table; I felt like applauding him.

Photo: Gigi, album

I've already told friends that I haven't really made resolutions this year. However, after writing about Brighton's phoenix-like spirit and reflecting on my own hardy Christmas tree,  grown-up from a supermarket novelty, I've encountered probably the toughest little robin this side of Hastings. On New Year's Day, I watched the skaters on the ice-rink in front of the Pavilion. As soon as the ice was cleared between sessions, a motley crew swished and staggered out. There was a lot of wobbling and clomping, quite a bit of teetering and rail-clinging; surprisingly little falling. From six to sixty year olds, there was a palpable sense of "trying". There are some rather pompous looking plastic "practice penguins" with grip handles for the very young or very wary, but they were largely left redundant. There was a lot of smiling: it made me feel that it really is exhilarating to have a go and then just great when success surprises you. 

One little girl of about seven stumbled out on her own and skidded straight into the barrier while her dad struggled to attach his skates. She looked terrified, with her feet splaying in opposite directions, but she'd circumnavigated the rink by the time her father had reached the ice, clinging to the rail the whole time. As she crashed against the barrier near me, I gave her an encouraging grin. She managed a wry little smile back as she lurched past the practice penguins disdainfully.

My schoolfriend Bernie used to send out letters and cards of encouragement including the motto:"Dream, Believe, Try, Achieve". Having lived her own advice, she's achieved many things since leaving the convent, including writing several books about whatever has fired her enthusiasm, and founding the influential "Women's Environmental Network". The Green MP for Brighton, Caroline Lucas, is one of their "matrons": the WEN doesn't have "patrons". I've actively appreciated the first half of Bernie's motto: I do believe in the power of dreams and goals, and I do have faith which enables me to be strong for people and things I care about. I even have a niggling awareness of my capabilities. But I then stop short of actually trying sometimes. 
As the frost set in towards the end of 2012, I wrote it off as one of several years with more moans than merriment, more losses than treasures. Last night, after spotting that one ceramic berry I hadn't taken off the ficus plant, I realised it's simply been a trying year; and therefore literally one full of opportunities for trying. Groucho Marx famously said that he wanted to live for ever and would die trying to; Judy Garland once declared that she definitely did believe in the power of a rainbow and had spent her whole life "trying to get over it". Somewhere between these two sentiments, there is a little patch of wintry ground where hopes, like little robins, shy away from calling themselves resolutions, just in case some quirky blonde is watching from the window. 
My godfather, "uncle Bob", was a bit of a trier  although he was often written off by folk as a dreamer. He was a former docker and merchant seaman from a working class family in a run-down part of Southwark, south London. He hadn't had the best education in the world, certainly with no time or funds for formal musical or literary instruction. Yet at his packed funeral in Rotherhithe some years ago, doubting friends were amazed to hear that he really had become a river pilot on his beloved Thames and indeed a Master Mariner; he actually had joined the Black Watch guards and learnt to play bagpipes; he did eventually have one or two of his many country compositions recorded in Nashville. 
A fellow lover of Robbie Burns, uncle Bob would recite huge chunks of his poetry; "Auld Lang Sine" was his favourite. He also particularly liked T.H. Palmer's "Try, Try", but I only realised why it was special to him after he died:

"'Tis a lesson you should heed, 

If at first you don't succeed, 

Try, try again. 

Then your courage should appear, 

For if you will persevere, 

You will conquer, never fear; 

Try, try again." 

When he suffered a heart attack at the age of seventy, it seemed inconceivable that he might not pull through: he was a battler, after all. My mother and I were stunned when his body seemed to give out on his spirit and he died of organ failure. My godfather's seemingly mundane and humble life had actually been an unpublicised Curriculum Vitae of persistence and quiet triumph.

I've always appreciated that a score in rugby is fittingly called a try, rather than a goal. Anyone who's ever played will testify to the deliberate and concentrated effort behind every try. Sorry to sound disparaging to any footie fan, but I've never heard of an accidental score in rugby ; it's not really possible to score an "own-try". So, my one resolution is actually just to try, about whatever and whenever I feel passionate to do so, but hopefully not just for the new year. Because hope is for life, not just for Christmas.

*For my friend Mel Bauwens, another tough little robin who achieved so much last year; and for Bobby Allen, RIP*

"You can't always get what you want,

But if you try sometimes

You might just find

You get what you need."

(The Rolling Stones)

"Courage doesn't always roar.Sometimes it's the quiet voice at the end of the day, saying 'I will try again tomorrow'."

(Mary Anne Radmacher)

"Try"  Pink

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." 

(Maya Angelou) 

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

(Albert Einstein) 

"Old long since" - The eve of a new year

"God said: “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky, to separate day from night. Let them mark the fixed times, the days and the years, and serve as luminaries in the dome of the sky, to shed light upon the earth.” And so it happened: God made the two great lights, the greater one to govern the day, and the lesser one to govern the night; and he made the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky, to shed light upon the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw how good it was. Evening came, and morning followed."

(The Book of Genesis 1:14)

I shall be working this New Year's Eve, until around 11pm - I'm grateful for it and would rather be earning than not, whatever the time of day or year! But I'm mindful of the significance of this evening, and tomorrow's dawn. I won't be one of the very hardy Brighton eccentrics who traditionally take to the sea in the January wind and rain on New Year's morning. But I am enough of a Brighton eccentric to want to walk down to the pier and along the pebble beach in wellies by myself tomorrow morning; it's one of the practical pleasures that drew me to this city in the first place.

Beyond that, I've resolved this year not to make New Year resolutions as such: I'd rather concentrate on what I need to do to enable what I want to happen in my life. Oscar Wilde said that resolutions at New Year are: "simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” I've learnt a lot about myself and the people around me over the past year; some of it, I've even liked. I'm hoping to grow to be more accepting of the things I don't readily like or even acknowledge. At the end of any day, not everyone will or should like me; but then only I have to be comfortable in my skin as I settle down with my cup of Redbush and an unseemly large piece of treacle tart. For someone who's spent most of her adult life dreading criticism about their clothes, this is progress. 
I realise that since starting this blog in February, I've surfaced as a kind of hybrid of Anne of Green Gables and Mrs Doyle found reading The Guardian on a long train journey. Luckily, I'm partial to all of these ingredients. It may not have been quite what I was expecting, or indeed everybody's cup of Redbush, but I believe it could have been a lot worse.

"May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours, 

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow wind

 

Work these words of

 love around you,

An invisible cloak 

To mind your life." 

(From "Beannacht - A New Year's Blessing", by the late, wonderful John O'Donohue)

"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day."

(Edith Lovejoy Pierce)

"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul."

(G.K. Chesterton)

"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right."

(Oprah Winfrey)

"New Year’s Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."

(Mark Twain) 

"For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice."

(T.S. Elliot)

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam." 

(Charles Lamb)

As a longtime fan of Robbie Burns, I love "Auld Lang Syne". He wrote the poem and set it to a traditional folk tune in 1788, yet it endures today across the English speaking world; at funerals and memorials, graduations and farewells and of course on New Year's Eve. The Scots title translated into English is simply "Old Long Since"; days gone by.
I care not a jot that it's been done to near death by any performer with half a tonsil, nor that Burns probably plagiarised a couple of 16th century folk songs to construct it: it is remembrance and rekindling in all simplicity. Included below is probably my favourite version, sung as Burns would have wanted to hear it.

"And surely you’ll buy your pint cup

and surely I’ll buy mine! 

And we'll take a cup o' kindness yet, 

for auld lang syne. 

And there’s a hand my trusty friend 

and give us a hand o’ thine! 

And we’ll take a cup o' kindness yet, 

for auld lang syne."

"Auld Lang Syne"  Paolo Nutini

                                                                                                                                                                      

Personally, I wish you all everything that you would wish for yourselves, but also every blessing and good thing that you may not know you yet require. May you wake tomorrow knowing your own name and those of your truest friends. If  you cannot give a name to God, may you be at peace with those who do, whatever that name may be. Be as good as you can be on any day, believing that both you and the world can be better still tomorrow. I hope your journey this past year has brought you closer to yourself and shown you that you can allow yourself and others a little more kindness in the next one.                                                                                                     Slainte, Namaste and God Bless X