In January 2007, I was more than usually liminal. I’d had the dull-moment year, I’d had the big payoff of being at Apple (being sat in Caffe Macs on the day of the iPhone keynote), I was a year after the great needle-scratch in my head, I was approaching 35 and subconsciously aware that I had not yet transitioned into Who I Was Going To Be Now – married, homeowner, living in California, without recourse to the things that had propped me up in the preceding times.
I’ve posted before about that time, mostly with reference to Trials Pub and O’Flaherty’s as part of my eternal search for a 4P’s replacement. As it turns out, having been to London three more times since then and finally visited Ireland, those two establishments are a lot closer to what their UK and Irish counterparts are like than they are to the 4Ps. And having visited London and Ireland and put some time in (about two and a half weeks each, respectively), I daresay I am at an age and station where the approximate real thing is more welcome to me than a 4Ps equivalent when I don’t have a huge gang to go out and brace me up on a Saturday night from 7 PM to 2 AM closing. Now I’m more than happy to call it a night sometime around 9 PM and head home.
There was a book that I read for the first time in January of 2007: At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, by Roger Ekrich. I don’t know why, but it was tremendously atmospheric somehow. I first heard of it some years earlier, on an overnight public radio show back in Virginia, but finally got around to buying it and reading it, and it specifically showed up when I started compiling the running list of “things I have enjoyed this year.” I don’t know of any other individual book that has ever made that list – the experience of reading has, certainly, but that book in particular was of a piece with the history-of-Catholicism classes I was enjoying for two or three years. It was history, it was intellectually engaging, and it was in its own way as cozy as firelight and heavy socks on a rainy January night.
I think I keep keying back on that January because it points toward where I find myself now a decade on: January means time for quiet, for cozy, for dim light and flannel and reading while the rain patters outside (when we can get any, of course). January 2009 meant a new job and a renewed commitment to transit. January 2011 meant a firm line on shutting down on Tuesday nights. January 2013…well, 2013 went to hell pretty quick and there wasn’t much relief since. At least this year, for now, for the moment, January feels like a good time to start developing better habits. Take the bus. Take the class. Unplug. Try to eat proper meals. Hell, if circumstances dictate, try to cook proper meals (already done once). Less Coke Zero (10 days and counting without). Drink the coffee mindfully and go to Vasper reliably. I liquidated the change on my dresser and turned it into new Kindle books – another book about night and another book about pubs, this being the history of the Irish pub specifically.
But first I have to re-read At Day’s Close.