The Diary of a Nobody

It began as a fairly standard conversation. A discussion of the benefits of wearing a fleece in the icy Christmas weather of 2009. A joke, even. ‘It saves money on the central heating, I suppose… wearing fleeces. Maybe a few at once.’ I was resisting the urge to poke fun at those cult garments, slankets – half fleece robe, half blanket, sort of like a fleece blanket with sleeves, designed for the old but taken up by the ‘middle young’ this year – when it happened. The words were spoken which would forever change the icy wasteland of this year’s frozen Christmas in my mind. ‘Ah,’ he replied, the man behind the counter in the busy Outdoor Shop, a lugubrious expression settling into the contours of his face. ‘But all the same… there are still people committing suicide.’

It seemed ridiculous at first, and yet… perhaps not. Perhaps it sums up, instead, the hidden sadness behind Christmas. The darkness which makes the fairylights shine out. Because Christmas, for which we plan for such a long time, is over so very fast. On midwinter day, this year, I heard anecdotal evidence that the first clutch of Easter eggs had arrived in WH Smith. In the bleak midwinter, indeed… the concept of new life. As the Christmas lights were twinkling, the people who would help to carry the Easter crucifix were limbering up in the wings. We see it, too, in the adverts shown on TV. We all complain, throughout each Autumn, that the Christmas advertising campaigns have started too early this year. As soon as the schools have got into the swing of the Autumn Term, they start to appear, in tandem (it seems) with the first turning of the autumn leaves. Then as the clocks change back to Greenwich Mean Time and the Halloween holidays pass us by, the Christmas ads are out in force, appearing on our TV screens with their relentless demands, a bit like the trick-or-treaters on our doorsteps… though not the appealing, young, innocent trick-or-treaters, but the tall, hairy, teenage variant, all hoodies and deep voices. Demanding money – now! -exclamation marks flying. Telling us, imperative-laden, how we should be celebrating Christmas, and making us feel inadequate that our food isn’t quite perfect and, though our living room may feature a glittering tree, we haven’t bought a new sofa or redecorated especially for the Festive Season. Goodwill to all men, but they can have their goodwill served up on the same plates and furniture as last year. There are, after all, limits.

Limits and all, though, we comply. We prepare for the feasting and the festival, irrespective of whether we believe in the mythologies behind it, of whether or not we’ll see the inside of a church over the Christmas season, of whether the tenets and traditions of Christianity play any part in our lives. We set budgets and exceed them, complain about the prescriptive menus of the traditional Christmas dinner and then shop for them, groan that there’s ‘nothing on TV again this year’, and then slump down and watch it all. For hours. And afterwards, when we see with delight that the binmen have arrived on the appointed day to rid us of the undesired memories of it all – turkey bones and ripped wrapping paper – mixed with the sense of relief and sense of purging, we’re left with a slight shame… a shame at our own excess. Too many presents – more stuff than we’ll ever need, it seems, as we make room on shelves and in cupboards and in wardrobes – and too much food as well, as we feel a waistband tighten and avoid the accusing glance of the bathroom scales.

On midwinter mornings like this, when I steel myself for the first brief mirror-glance of the day, I imagine, just for a second, that my face has come from the prototype of a Picasso portrait. Nothing seems quite right. Exhaustion and the grey-toned daylight seem etched deep below my eyes, so that I imagine how I’m feeling inside is as visible as a light bulb to everyone I meet. That it’s there, in the clearest of fonts, that I’m thinking too much about all of this wintriness… the landscapes, the weather, the ice which underlies the prescribed conviviality of the parties and the jollity. In the same way that I worry, perhaps too much, about whether the road I’m travelling on will hold the hidden danger of black ice, I’m always conscious – perhaps too conscious – that the undercurrents of the happy flow of hugs and handshakes may be every bit as deceptive as the mistletoe thrust jokingly above the heads of would-be couples at a Christmas party. Mistletoe is poisonous, after all – those waxy white berries will get you if the hastily-established romance doesn’t – and a parasite. You have to hope the partner met beneath its shadow is rather less of an imposition! Someone asked me recently what the point was of my wearing such small earrings when they weren’t visible to others now that my hair had grown so long. ‘But I know they’re there,’ I explained, ‘and they’re light… they won’t give me a headache!’ I suppose my choice was the counterpoise to the conflict between style and pain, stated to perfection recently when someone told me about her friend who takes two aspirin as she pulls on her Spanx every morning, to hide her waistline’s bulges. The conflict remains… I stand by my right to wear imperceptible adornments, and yet have acquired some larger earrings for 2010…

Part of Christmas, these last few years, has been the culmination of the exciting pantomine of The X Factor. This year brought controversy, as an internet campaign prevented this year’s winner from claiming the Christmas Number One slot to which he must almost have felt entitled. Rage Against the Machine was the name of the band which unseated the Cowell-backed success juggernaut… a statement, whether deliberate or not, of the Machine which seems to guarantee fame and success to those who join in the drama of the reality talent show. A week after Christmas, the Rage had died down and the X Factor winner quietly slipped into the Number One spot, predictably enough perhaps. The anti=Cowell campaigners had won their point, but their win was as brief as an exploding firework, lasting just as long as it took to make their point. This year in particular, the ephemeral nature of success has never been so clear. Susan Boyle, runner-up in Britain’s Got Talent, client of The Priory Private Clinic within hours of the final. Jade Goody, famous for being famous, resident of the Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother houses, dead of cervical cancer. Fans of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing up in arms, once again, that the celebrities weren’t A-List enough and the eventual winner was popular and nice rather than being the best dancer. We live in the scrutiny of our own reality shows. As we’re hurt by a comment or a look – or a lack of words or regard – it’s as though we’re subject to a public vote or a judge’s score for everything we do. How we dress. Where we shop. What we weigh. Whether we look our age. What we drive, and most of all… what we do. I’m often asked, in tones of some disparagement, whether what I do for a living was just some sort of terrible accident. Why I’m not doing something more exciting, more rewarding, more noticeable, somehow. Contemporaries from school and university are now, if not household names, reasonably successful in the things I love most, like writing and music and education. I am nobody… invisible in a crowd, a bit like the small silver earrings beneath the untidy mid-length hair. I deflect the questions as often as I can, joking: ‘Oh, you know… I still want to be a writer when I grow up!’ Words to that effect. I don’t have a Sat Nav, but if I did, I’m sure its imperious voice would be constantly shouting at me about roads not taken. At my most rational, I remember that success is not necessarily defined by the votes or scores of others… that success has more to do with having a functioning personal life and maintaining a demanding and often satisfying working life. And yet… sometimes the afternoon darkness, or a grey-backlit reflection, or an unexpected patch of ice brings me up short and I am left wondering… is this it?

We shield ourselves against the cold in fleece and cashmere, and against the emptiness of our lives in the swathing comfort of routine. I keep my Blog updated – my Diary of a Nobody – and persuade myself it’s just a five-finger exercise to keep my creative mind alert, in preparation for writing that novel I so often dream about. And yet, supposing this really is it? That the end of my timespan will bring forgetfulness, a bit like now when I look back on my own schooldays, half-forgotten because of the routine which kept so many days the same. That I’ll be just like that pair of half-glimpsed silver earrings – imperceptible, soon forgotten, more often overlooked.

Success is as deceptive as a roadway of black ice, which needs sunlight to shine on it to make its hazards glisten. It’s as ephemeral as Christmas… as all-defining, heralded, and brief. As fickle as a friendship – as arbitrary as a mark out of ten. As the old year creeps, in the dark, towards its baton change with the new year, the new decade, we do what we can to comfort ourselves against the cold night around us… the bleak midwinter meantime of being nobody.