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Jayne Dawson: The comforting delights of cold, bare January
Here we are then, washed up on the foreign shores of 2010, feeling a bit vulnerable, a bit self-conscious and a little bit apprehensive.
We're all stripped of our festive armour, that lovely, sparkly December shell that allows us to say: "So what, it's Christmas" to almost everything.
It's good while it lasts but now it's all gone and suddenly we feel as exposed as someone walking into their office for the first time with a drastic new hairstyle.
We have been hurtled back into the land of caring, worrying and calorie counting – though not entirely since I am writing this through a blizzard of icing sugar as I finish off the last of the Turkish delight – well someone has to and it might as well be me, the founder of the feast.
It's a relief though, isn't it, getting back to normal?
Come on, admit it, there is something comforting in bare January. Something rather lovely about those low skies, that enveloping grey light, those long, quiet evenings. After all the stress of trying to make merry, routine and plainness and normality have a big attraction.
Right now, we're all feeling a bit like children recently let loose at a birthday party – it was great for a bit but then we were all secretly pleased when our mums wiped away the chocolate smudges and took us home for tea, bath and bed.
The longing for normal started early for my friend who, in the midst of all the festive excess, found herself craving a plate of toast and jam – so she made herself a big plateful, settled on the sofa in front of the telly and all was lovely until she took the first bite and found her taste buds getting to grips with a mouthful of cranberry jelly, which is not the worst food combination in the world I suppose, but just a bit of disappointment when you are looking forward to a strawberry sensation.
Me, I'm not quite at the toast stage yet, though to be honest I could do with something to take the edge off the Turkish delight sugar rush. I'm thinking the remains of the stand pie…
In general though Turkish delight is off the menu and low fat, probiotic yoghurt is very much on. And this is not so much a food choice as a metaphor for life – at least until Valentine's Day.
All the television adverts have switched from hedonistic to health-conscious with such whole-heartedness that you would believe them to be appealing to a species of human being entirely different to the pre-Christmas market – if you hadn't seen it all before last January, that is.
For the next few weeks it will all be about Special K, Activia yogurt and Weightwatchers ready meals, and Baileys, Lambrusco and Iceland party food will disappear as completely as if they had never existed. It's a schizophrenic switch and completely bonkers – but I like it all the same. The switch from December to January is like the changing of the seasons from autumn to winter. We might think autumn is prettier but we need the barrenness of winter to make us appreciate it.
Empty
So I like seeing my house all bare and empty when the Christmas decorations are back in the loft – all 20 boxes of them.
(Have you done that yet – does anybody at all leave their decorations up until January 6 any more?)
I like throwing away the silly bits of plastic that fell out of the Christmas crackers, along with the dregs of wine and the stale bits of stollen, and the Christmas cards – though usually I save these for a few months in the belief that I am going to turn them into next year's gift tags, like my mother-in-law does.
This is because I have yet to accept the three basic mother-in-law rules which are that I will never be able to crochet a blanket like her, I will never be able to make meat and potato pie like her, and that I will never sit down with a pair of pinking shears and make gift tags out of last year's cards like her.
But I do like spending a morning tidying up all the stuff inside my computer, emptying my inbox of all those emails that I should have killed off at the time and, at home, seeing the fridge full of plain food and devoid of leftovers, apart from the brandy butter and that carton of double cream, obviously.
But most of all I like the fact that January is a complete contrast to December because Turkish delight is lovely but, to be honest, I feel a bit sick now.
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Weather for Leeds
Sunday 12 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 0 C to 5 C
Wind Speed: 7 mph
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Sunny spells
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