Time always seems to accelerate towards the end of November, when I become aware of the imminence of Christmas. Away from the artificial daylight of a library or office, the days themselves do become compressed in the run-up to the solstice. However many parties are cancelled, as they were this year, they never free up enough time to complete the tasks I had set myself at the start of December. At Paddington Station, waiting for a train heading west, time seems to move at an alarming speed. It reaches a fever pitch at the barriers, surrounded by the homesick, searching their phones for QR codes where once they fumbled for little orange tickets.
After Reading, time starts to slow down in the quiet coach. The commuter population disperses here, and those of us here for the long haul can start to settle in. The atmosphere in the carriage this year is tenser than in previous years, for obvious reasons. But crucially, the train to Hereford still encourages the illusion that a train ride of just under three hours is a proper journey, a whole day’s endeavour.
In Hereford, I meet my mum in the supermarket car park and we walk to the garden of The Barrels: my primordial pub, the pub against which I compare all other pubs and find them wanting. We take a seat at a wooden bench. The beating heart of most good pubs is the part of the bar closest to the front door. The Barrels is different; its real centre of gravity is just outside the back door, which opens onto a spacious courtyard decorated with old tobacco advertisements.
The pandemic has changed little here, in one of the world’s great all-weather beer gardens. Only there is a void above the bar where a sign once was, which until recently — really quite recently! — read something like:
You wouldn’t order a pint in NatWest — so don’t ask us if you can pay by bank card!
I wish I had taken a picture of it years ago, but it’s not really the kind of bar where one takes too many photos.
Back across the border in Monmouthshire, the days really are longer, which allows me to take the occasional glance back at the year. Unlike in 2020, I wrote quite a bit over the last twelve months. I won’t list everything, but you can find the highlights here. My partner and I moved to South London in June, which feels all the more momentous when I consider that I started 2020 in Berkeley, expecting to live in California for at least four more years, and that I started 2021 in my childhood bedroom, with no definite end in sight.
If all goes to plan, I will be at the British School at Rome from January until March, working on a few chapters of my Ph.D. dissertation. I don’t expect I’ll write another newsletter before then, but there will be plenty to write about in Rome, I’m sure, as long as I can get there.
Until then, I will wish you Merry Christmas with a few parting words from a strange poem by T. S. Eliot. It is not a strange poem per se, but strange that it is written by Eliot, of all people. Eliot is almost unrecognisable here as the poet of The Journey of the Magi, a truly epic Christmas poem, full of “hard and bitter agony,” which never fails to make the hairs on my arms stand on edge.
This poem, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, could not be more different. It is nostalgic, or rather, it is about nostalgia. Eliot wrote it in 1954, decades after The Journey of the Magi, with little of the angst of the modernist or zeal of the convert that characterised his earlier poetry. On first reading it feels somewhat sentimental. But this is exaggerated, I think, by how surprised we are to find the author of The Waste Land describing a child’s wonder at Christmas, contemplating:
[T]he glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,[…]
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,[…].
Glittering rapture; amazement; “the accumulated memories of annual emotion.” All these exist uneasily alongside fatigue; failure; the awareness of death. But exist they do, and exist they must.