How do you see it? The ribbon of time.
IS it a ribbon? Or calendar of boxes? Or a scribbled ball of wool? How you see time depends in large part on whether you’re a timelord or not, I guess. Personally, I am as old as I look.
The arbitrary marking out of chunks of experience into years and days of the world turning forces an edit of memories into a false juxtaposition. If you follow my drift. Why should last January 1 relate to December 31? Today will have rather more pertinent bearing on tomorrow, won’t it? Given what usually happens on New Year’s Eve, very much so, I should think.
Though, what usually actually happens on New Year’s Eve is everyone scares away from going out and facing the tyranny of the chimes and the ‘celebrations’. None of us wants to be at your party, so don’t bother with one, mate – we spent years holding out for a cooler offer than your sad seasonal bash when we were younger, and now we feel so middle-aged and tired and naggingly disappointed we really don’t want to kiss your stupid face UH-GEN and pretend we have anything to celebrate with you. It was a crap ‘year’. Like every year. Or it was fine, but who cares. And your party would be huge let-down anyway, let’s face it. Too many people. Too few people. Too ugly people. Too you. Too us. Whatever. Thanks for the thoughtless invite to your deluded bloody cheerfulness, anyway.
..Yeah so to get round all that we had a party last night instead. And everyone seemed to have a great time. We’re all Facebooking about it in our pypamas and couldn’t be happier by all latest online accounts.
Proving the point that we don’t half need those arbitrarily marked-out chunks of time to look back on. Editorial highlights of memory to remind us we’re alive. Or something. Shuddup and gimme a kiss, anyway.
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For us, 2012 was remarkably, on balance, pretty good. I think we may be fairly alone in this odd respect. Momo’s PowerPoint presentation of achievements during this calendar actually could be made to look very entertaining, but many amigos and chums have had a fight of a year. We look for patterns and comparisons, but really the metrics can tell you whatever you want them to. Meaning is really about progress. Starting with whether you simply survived or not.
Well Momo survived another year and, more importantly, got away with many fun things. In fact, the collection of music written this year and the development of Tempo’s story especially is so quietly significant, it’s hard to picture how many of these things were not in place or existence this time last December. And that included the majority of friendships at the little Not New Year’s Eve bash filling the Playmo Mansion with noise and colour and kindness lastnight.
As I sign off Two Thousand And Twelve, however, as proud as I am of many of the little tunes and splashes of colour that my shed in the garden has produced, and more so of the people and talents that have done things in it, I think the over-riding emotional resonance of the year did not, remarkably, come from any of that. I am indebted to so many good friends who’ve been able to help me bring alive creative work to be proud of – collaborations, project opportunities and services all helping us make good stuff, and make some progress in our creative, professional and personal lives. Which is all just Our Life. I shall feel much love and pride hearing Undo, Nudge, Adventures Into The Monochronium and Eighty Bells, and watching back a YouTube Channel of play that didn’t exist twelve months back. But the memories will be channeled into a larger instinctive feeling.
A collective memory of a whole random edit of people, finding themselves sharing an island and a moment in time.
Sporting performances and the 2012 London Olympics made my little country seem, feel and believe it was a better, bigger place this summer. And the committed work of thousands of people made it happen – people who saw something beyond themselves at hand to get excited about, and who wouldn’t give up on it. And for all the sport, politics, engineering and organisation that put it there, it was an experience brought truly alive by creativity. My own little cardial organ will swell with some sort of oddly helpless humility and excitement at the thought of the opening ceremony. Or of Bradley Wiggins’ standing on the centre podium in Paris two weeks before it after a swirl of beautiful TV footage following his primal ambitions in the most high-tech race in history. And of how normal we all think it is now to see paralympians belting for medals alongside anyone else going for the impossible.
That feeling. That moment in time. It may look like some odd kink in a long ribbon in my head, but it feels like a blinked glimpse at the universe in my heart. Here. Where we all find ourselves living together, right now.
A very wise close member of our family once said something sad that has stuck with me. “Looking back over a lifetime, I regret only one thing. I wish we’d celebrated more.”
This little length of time isn’t a ribbon. It’s a rosette. Awarded to all of us after playing some tiny shared part in a kind of progress. In developing a bigger story than our own, just by surviving. Together.
And it is awarded for inspiration.
See you in 2013. I have no idea what it will look like. But in no small part thanks to you, I am excited about it.
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