A New 'New Year's'

“This year, I resolve to... make no resolutions.”

I have made this New Year’s Resolution for the past several years and, since doing so, my success rate at keeping New Year’s Resolutions has soared dramatically.

To be perfectly honest with you, I do have a certain pragmatism about this New Year business.

While I have no objection to people abusing themselves by becoming drunk, diseased and pregnant over the passage of one night it occurs to me that the notion of the celebration is somewhat vague.

The grandiose celebrations that are lavishly spread around the World to welcome in a New Year is something that affects, not just our pocket, but our psyche.

Let me explain.

A few hundred years ago some itinerant monk or mathematician—possibly one man with two hats, decided that the calendar that was currently in use was inadequate. It failed to allow for the idea of the Earth’s orbit around the sun was not three hundred and sixty five days at all. A year, it was demonstrated, was perceptibly more than that.

Sadly, there was no way of dividing a day up into small parts. We could not, at eight o’clock in the morning on one specific day, say that we had had enough of that day for now and that it must become midnight immediately.

As a consequence, the addition of an extra day every fourth year was the way forward to make up the extra time consumed by the orbital wanderings of our planet.

Brilliant idea. There is no doubting the wisdom involved in this decision. There is also a staggering astonishment at the will to adapt to this new system by the current ‘Powers That Be’ knowing, as we do, how resistant ‘Powers That Be’ are to change.

We are also aware of how resistant everybody is to change. To adopt this new system was a paradigm shift of the first water!

So. What happened?

Somebody, somewhere, in the halls of power made a decision.

“A week Monday it will be January First of the New Year,” came the edict from above.

And so it was.

The first of January for the new calendar was an arbitrarily selected date. It could have been any day at all. We could well be celebrating our New Year on what should have been August 14^th but for the whim of a ‘Power That Be’.

And so we fix our eyes to the television to see that first array of fireworks over New Zealand that marks the first moment of the New Year creeping across the Pacific and into our lives.

After only a short while, can it be only a week? We are plunged into yet another festivity.

Vast sums are spent once again but, this time, on fireworks and alcohol. Alcohol that lowers the inhibitions and enables us to dance like disjointed marionettes whilst becoming increasingly louder and incoherent.

Thus there are so many who greet the dawn of the first day of the New Year in a parlous state of despair, wishing that the pain rummaging around in our heads would go away; others not yet knowing that they have obtained some social disease and others that they are now pregnant with a vicarious gift from the New Year Fairy.

But, hey! It was fun. For a few hours, that we can recollect, we have had a wonderful time. Now we can spend the next eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours until the next New Year’s celebrations asking everyone if we had a good time. Or not.

Of course, the ‘knock on’ effect of this is:

Astrology. This randomly applied day, this day that was nominated by the ‘Powers That Be’, is the basis for the astrological forecast that we avidly soak up from each edition of the Dailies.

You may be pregnant from the festivities but, at least, you can comfort yourself with the idea that, were it not for the spin of a capricious fate, you could still be a ‘Virgo’!

Christmas? Bah! Humbug!

I have mentioned before this that I have an antipathy to Christmas. I have no argument with those who wish to believe that there is a religious, and highly spiritual, meaning to Christmas. My hackles tend to go up at the vast largesse that is expended.

The people that spend vast sums on Christmas do so because they are bent on celebration. It is not enough to have a multitude of lights or enough food to appease the appetites of a marching army. A celebrant has to spend vast sums on gifts that will, very likely, be less appreciated than the anticipation of receiving them.

It is those sums of money that will oppress the borrower for another twelve months—perhaps more. If they are lucky, the debt will be cancelled in time for another splurge next year.

So the cycle goes on.

Those that are celebrating will tell you that they are validating their belief in the birth of the baby Jesus; that these sums represent a sacrifice that they are prepared to pay in order to show that their hearts and intentions are pure for the coming year.

Is that so? Is it really a sacrifice?

The stress of preparation, not just in the realms of purchasing but also in the work involved in decorating, cooking and wrapping, is just a small sample of the sickness that is the festive season.

The marketing and advertising people have a field day—it is the time when they can sell almost anything to anybody just by telling you that it is necessary to have it for a successful Yuletide.

Buy the festive detergent that will make the stocking you put out for Santa brighter than anyone else’s.

An element of one-up-manship never goes amiss in such situations.

How can your child possibly live another year without the ‘Miley Cyrus Twerking Kit—complete with Robin Thicke Doll’ the lack of which will make your offspring a laughing stock at school?

It is nonsensical.

The degree of debt that people will rack up in order to satiate the demands of the credit companies is staggering.

It is a ‘must have’ culture for people who don’t have. People who are struggling to pay their day-to-day bills and feed the children.

Keep up with the Jones’ or be mocked.

Spend or be damned but, then, be damned anyway.

In all this, what happened to the spirit of charity? Real giving; that tenderness and sympathy for the less fortunate?

All over the World there are people being killed and mutilated; there are children dying of starvation and disease.

For a few days, every winter, we stuff ourselves with all the good things that we can lay our hands on. We drink to excess.

We sit back to watch the Christmas programmes on television, that are yet more recycled dross and mental pap, with stomachs stretched and bloated.

We kill ourselves with excess.

Is there any thought to stretching out a hand to help those who are desperate for help. People, human souls, who yearn for something—anything, to eat. People who could be saved with minor medication that we think nothing of; things that are taken for granted.

People—persons, who yearn for clean water instead of sipping what they can get from filthy streams, from the liquor that forms from rubbish tips that stink with the foetid odour of decay and those who have no water at all.

Christmas is really a time for thinking of others.

I do not believe that Jesus was born on the 25^th December; I do not believe that he was born in a stable or that his birth, and start in life, was viewed by shepherds and wise men.

I believe he was born and that some day should be set aside to recognise that idea.

I believe that the pagan festivals attached to Christmas should be set aside and recognised for what they are.

Christmas trees and lights are fun. They are pretty. It is nice to give presents and it is nice to receive presents. It is wonderful to have friends and family visit as it is at any time of year.

But we have forgotten what it is all about.

We have forgotten what is at the root of the celebration.

We have become victims of the corporate desire to make profits. Santa and his bag of presents has hypnotised us into a divergent belief.

The Reindeer are as mythical as our good will to all men.

What’s In A Name?

A few weeks ago, before I became immersed in lots and lots of work, somebody asked me about names.

At first I was puzzled, there was no clue as to the context of their query and then it became clear that the question concerned ‘making up names’. Names used in stories.

Where do authors get names from for their characters? Some writers look at the telephone directory; they search through or they open at random and stick a pin in the listings.

Sometimes they will scan the credits at the end of films and shows on TV but that can get you unstuck!

For example: there is a show currently on TV starring Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu called ‘Elementary’. It is yet another spin-off of the great Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ tales but set in New York. This is because everything happens in America and Americans are unable to associate with anything from anywhere else. The point here is that there is a name that appears early in the credits, it is a ‘Jill Footlick’. I do hope that she will forgive me for not knowing what her function on the show is although ‘Google’ now informs me that she is the Unit Production Manager and so her function is still a mystery to me.

That is, it seems, her real name. Yet if I, or any other author, were to make so bold as to use that name in a story then the story should, very likely, lose credibility.

The trick is that the names of our characters have to be realistic. Even aliens need to have names that smack of reality. Calling somebody ‘Sptzlk’ might look good on the back of a soccer player’s jersey but it bodes ill in the text of a novel.

(NB: There is a fellow who plays for Liverpool FC called Skrtl. No, really. I know of no other player who lacks vowels so emphatically!)

Apart from telephone directories, where else can we go? We search among our friends and, sometimes, family. We refer to words from other languages and cultures.

It is sometimes a twist on things we hear. A comedian called Russell Peters was making fun of Tamil names because they are inclined to be very, very long. Something he said clicked a word in my head that, after massaging, became ‘Desrabreshanyanay’. How did it happen? Who knows.  But the character in one of my novels is now called ‘Jer Desrabreshanyanay’; I have to say that it rolls off the (my?) tongue quite nicely!

Where did the likes of Harka’aani and Murekko’aani come from? Who can say? They are names that just popped into the head. The same with Ritta’aadu and Bimmana’aadu. Eventually we discover, from the second book and from the ‘prequel’ that Ritta’aadu was, originally ‘Rhittach’ until Harka’aani renamed her.

Who knows what aliens really call themselves? Fictitious aliens have to be called something that humans can connect with. That is why we have Luke Skywalker and Han Solo—not to mention Yoda!

Having a name that is, at least, almost realistic is an imperative. Using names that sound comedic in an otherwise serious situation is not going to sound convincing.

And yet we see names all the time where we definitely say, “What is that? Did somebody really call their baby THAT?”

Reality and fiction are far apart. Fiction just has to sound more real.