The still days

I always embark on January with a dash of wistful regret. The most delightful days are over for another year. Not the warm and busy abundance of Christmas, or the late night partying of New Year, fun as it all is. 

What I really treasure are the still, nameless days stretching between Christmas and New Year. The days when you sail about in an uncharted ocean of time with no plans and no commitments, only abandoning pyjamas if the weather outside looks tempting or you run out of milk. Meals happen piecemeal, and life swims in and out of imaginary worlds reading, playing with Christmas toys, having pointless conversations with loved ones, watching TV and napping on the sofa.

In our hyper-productive, artificially lit, instantly communicating world, these are the only days that you are allowed to waste. The rest of the year the clock is king. Alarms drag us to and fro as we hurry between work and school, dentist's appointments, a booked session on the badminton court. We are hunted through our days by the clock. When we're late we're anxious and apologetic; when we're early we hustle to find a productive use for the extra sliver of time.

Before the industrial revolution and factory working, before clocks and electric light, perhaps the whole of winter was like the still days. With only candles or soft oil lamps to push back the night, it would flood in sooner, you'd go to bed sooner - probably waking in the night for a while before drifting back off to sleep again before morning. That unmeasured, unscheduled time enclosed in night would be an enchanted time for musing, talking with a wakeful bedfellow, making love.

Modern sleep is almost a chore, something you need to fit in enough of before the alarm goes off. If you wake at 2am feeling refreshed you'll likely panic about how on earth you're going to get back to sleep in time to get enough sleep before the alarm goes off at 6, and how exhausted you're going to feel all day if you don't.

There's no rest anywhere except between Christmas and New Year. We pack our weekends with rewards and chores that we couldn't get done in the week, and on holidays we generally go off to have adventures: making the most of our time. But it doesn't work. We need to live more off-clock and I just can't wait till next December.

I'd like to institute my own watchless weekends. I'm not sure if it will work over such a short period of time, or if we can do this as a single household, surrounded by open shops and rumbling buses. How much of the still days is in the air? The noise level in the street? The number and demeanour of walkers in the park? But I'm going to have to try. The clock's been in charge for 400 years and that seems enough. Let's make space for organic time, dreaming time, human time.