A Pinch and a Punch, 'Tis a Rubbish Month

When trying to sum up how we felt about being back at work today after all of our festivities, all we could muster was a collective 'bleeergh'. Oh January, you are tough.

We'll leave it to George Mackay Brown to describe this month in this excerpt from a 1972 column for the Orcadian:

 

January

 

 

 

January is the month when for a morning or two you expect to wake up with a dry mouth at least.

 

 

January is the month when you observe, sadly, six of your seven good resolutions blow away on the cold wind.

 

 

January is the month you dismantle-on a precise date, the sixth - the Christmas tree and give all those expensive Christmas cards to the children to scrawl on with their crayons.

 

 

January is the month when bills seem to seep through your letter box with pitiless monotony. The man who was as rich as Rockefeller on Christmas Eve is poor now as a church mouse.

 

 

January is the month when you wait for the worst of the winter to fall, sleet and hail and snow out of the north-east. You kind of exist between an iron earth and a leaden sky.

 

 

...

 

 

January is the month when the full moon is most glorious of all (although I think the stars have it, for December).

 

 

There is no month of the year quite like January. What is better than a walk along the west shore in that cold, silver air?

 

 

George Mackay Brown

 

 

 

 

 

The rest of the entry can be found in Letters From Hamnavoe, columns written for The Orcadian  between 1971 and 1975.