On opening one eye, the winter sun is streaming through the blinds. On this day of days. I slowly turn over the engine room of my addled mind, scouring the bedrock of my broken subconscious.
Fragments of the dream emerge – churned up with a rasping dry throat, brain dullness from a combination of an astringent hangover and soporific state sponsored psych meds – as I recall the spiders of my dream from the deep near forgotten hours of the night.
There was an infestation, a plague of spiders, scuttling over piles of half dead bodies, some crawling out of mouths, others manifesting and repopulating like a fountain, cascading wildly on the cobwebbed jungle floor of the dream.
I absently wonder whether these were the Coronavirus spiders of 2020’s fate and destiny, spinning and weaving their web round the globe, sinking their plagued teeth into their million multitudes of victims.
In this year of years. On the final day of 2020.
A cold icy wind blows through the open crack in the lounge window, as I undress the gold blinged-up Christmas tree of its shiny baubles, glittery stars and flashing lights. A strange melancholia creeps over as I perform the ritual, an undressing of the past, as I unbox a memory from Christmas of yesteryear.
Of falling, a foolish teenage binge drinker, down a steep flight of stairs, arms bearing gifts, ending up in a crumpled heap, in my old home of childhood, in a ragged tinsel town, in the rainy winter gloom of the landlocked Midlands.
Sunken in my ripped and tatty brown leather sofa, I can feel the onset, the predictable tsunami of a deep existential ache associated with this time of year. A familiar dance of shadows and light, of loneliness and friendships, in the dawning of a New Year. So, I dig deeper, and have a little flirt with social media, send out a few greetings to a few old faces, casting the drift net of solitude a little wider, as I sip and contemplate the state of shit over a brew.
As the fireworks begin to scream, in the deathly quiet nightly hallows of the neighbourhood, resident dogs dive for cover, and kids dash to the windows. The rocket sirens of peace and goodwill feel as incendiary as the backstreets of Gaza, in this night of nights, brimming over with planetary strife, pandemics and political poleaxing.
This night, a deep sleeping leviathan stirs, a long-buried compulsion to kick on and party like its 1999.
Ironic, perhaps, when warehouse and house parties everywhere are being raided, dispersed, fined and impounded across the Island. Everyone caught between the two bare arse cheeks of Janus, with Covid and Brexit chaos tattooed on either buttock, as the brass neck partying and anarchic sound-systems are put on ice for another year.
And locked down indoors, watching the Box, as the giant clock hands of Big Ben turn midnight, I wonder at the people’s hopes and dreams colliding under the clear night sky, revealing for a second the faces behind the masks, in this the age of the real millennium bug.
And, as the lonely fireworks of London break out, I feel a hand of hope fall over the proceedings: as the tip of the Shard turns electric green; Coldplay booms out over Tower Bridge; and flying drones recreate the NHS logo like starlings in the night sky.
I make a resolution to get on board Alicia Keyes ‘time machine’ to the past, present and future, and turn my attention to the impending hangover of the new day today.