JANUARY

“… a hot bath is the best place for all of us in the miserable month of January. The excitement of Christmas is long past and school is soon beginning again and there is really nothing to look forward to except the cold weeks ahead. If I had my way I would remove January from the calendar altogether and have an extra July instead.

For the last twelve months we have been living in one year and now all of a sudden it is another. It is extraordinary how this tremendous change takes place in the space of a fraction of a second. As the clock approaches midnight on the thirty-first of December you are still in the old year, but then all at once, one millionth of a second after midnight, you are in the new. I have always found this sudden change from one year to another awfully hard to get used to, and all through the new January that follows I keep writing down the old year instead of the new one on letters and cheques and other bits of paper. The same sort of thing happens on your birth when you are nine years old one day and ten years old the next. It is lovely to be a year older, but it is the suddenness of it all that is so amazing.”

~ from My Year by Road Dahl