Brian Bilson put out a poem this week on facebook called Mnemonic and it goes like this:

Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November.

Unless a leap year is its fate,

February hath twenty-eight,

All the rest hath three days more,

Excepting January,

Which hath six thousand,

One hundred and eighty four.

I related to that because it’s turning into one of those months when it’s dark and cold and things go wrong. At the beginning of the month I was suffering the distress of a car bump, which happened on one of those dark mornings where you get up and leave the house before you are awake and in this case it turned out that a neighbour had parked their car on the other side of the road opposite our house, and this car was a BMW that was exactly the same colour as a winter’s morning, especially one viewed through the less than perfectly clean rear window of my winter-filthed vehicle. The BMW was a nondescript grey, a car designed to blend into the background and I reversed straight into it, hitting what I thought was just the cold greyness of a winter’s morning with the nasty sound of scraping, crunching vehicular destruction. If you set off on a winter’s morning and you are not as awake as you should be, this kind of noise will get you as alert as you need to be for the rest of the day.

The BMW was not badly damaged but my car was looking decidedly less respectable than it had the night before, taking me in my mind back to some of the dodgy automobiles I had the misfortune to own in years gone by. There was a Yugo 45 with a petrol incontinence problem that meant that no one was allowed to smoke within ten feet of it and its fuel consumption probably meant I was driving in 1994 at 2024 prices. Often it wouldn’t start and I would imagine it talking to me saying ‘Yugo on ahead. I’ll just stay here.’ Before that there were a couple of mini metros, one of which came with green credentials – it was one of the world’s first biodegradable cars, by which I mean that in the end it got so rusty that the floor fell out while I was driving it. My cousin, David, recalls a sizable hole had appeared in the passenger side footwell, and one night he was a passenger when I drove through a puddle with a bit more speed than I should have done and he got drenched by the wave that caught him from head to foot. 

I don’t miss those days of my youth when every time I got into a car there was the distinct possibility that it might not make it to where I was going, a time before mobile phones when you might have to walk for miles to get help. Once, back in the early 1990s, I had a flat tyre and when I looked in the car boot there was no jack for the car so I walked half a mile and borrowed a jack off a farmer. I then walked back to the car, changed the tyre, took the jack back to the farmer and thanked him, went back to the car and found I’d put the flat one back on. How would I not notice that? When I went back to explain I can remember that farmer didn’t say much, but the subtext of what he was trying not to say was that he thought I had some of my marbles, but definitely not all of them. He insisted on driving back with me and this time he changed the tyre for me whilst I stood by the road like a traffic light, feeling green and turning red.

In comparison to some of the things that have happened in the past, this latest incident is not much. It’s not even a good anecdote,  but it’s no fun telling your neighbour you’ve bashed their car and dealing with insurance and so on. It is one of the things that has made January drag.

This month I have also been to the dentist for the beginning of some major dental work. On Friday I went in for an extraction and my new dentist greeted me in a rather funereal way, saying, “I’m sorry we are not meeting under better circumstances.” Of course, extractions aren’t fun but that seemed to me to be more sombre than was strictly required so I explained to the dentist that whilst the tooth she was taking out and I had travelled many miles together on the road of life, experiencing all the peaks and troughs that life throws at us,  I did not feel a sentimental attachment to my tooth and it wouldn’t be upsetting for us to part company. The dentist nodded as if she understood, though the look she gave me did remind me of a farmer who once lent me a jack to change a tyre back in the early 1990s.

The tooth has gone now, but I got a better sense of what the dentist might have meant when she said “I’m sorry we’re not meeting under better circumstances’ when I saw the bill for the dental work I am supposed to be having in the next few months. It turns out having implants put into your mouth is an expensive business. If I go through with this, the contents of my mouth will be worth a bit – I might have to sleep with my head in a safe. 

And so January goes on with cold mornings and deadlines and trying to keep the heating bills down by wearing so many layers I look like the Michelin man. Walking into work one day I told a colleague that underneath all these layers I am wearing is a man with a 28 inch waist and of course they weren’t amused but gave me the familiar slightly worried look of the farmer that lent me a jack all those years ago.

Perhaps winter makes us all more serious than is good for us. Maybe we should laugh a little more – watch a romcom, tell a joke, crack a smile, especially if you have one that you have had to pay a dentist lots of money to get. By the way, if you go to the dentist and they ask you to “open up,” try telling them you don’t know them well enough to share your personal feelings and you too can experience a certain worried look that I have come to know well.