Don't Be Cold, Don't Be Angry To Me

The 1970s were responsible for some real horrors perpetrated in the name of music. Pilot were not in the A-list of offenders, but they did bequeath us "January" and memory of a lead singer who looked like a girly Peter Marinello, which was saying something, given that the new George Best appeared to have stepped out of Pan's People.

"Don't be cold, don't be angry to me." I'm all in favour of obscure lyrics, but how does a month display its anger? And why is it angry "to" me? Wrong preposition. But nevertheless, now I think of it, it is - a month being angry - rather poetic. Pilot were the new Wordsworths. Well, maybe not.

January isn't usually angry. But it stores up trouble. It is the month to reconnoitre the tree tops. You wander lonely staring at clouds, but in fact at the pines, their branches crowned with the coconut shies of the caterpillars' furry, testicular wombs. Through the needles, though, you see only blue sky, for this January is like so many - alarmingly warm and bright. Don't be cold with me; not at the moment it isn't.

The warmth, however, is the threat of trouble being stored up for when the weather breaks and for when the caterpillar nests also break and tip their crawling caravans earthwards. In the lonely days of January, the cats can sleak around and scavenge undisturbed, but then they come across the caterpillars. From the litters of moths to the litter of a cat prone on the ground, feigning sleep but in fact stone cold dead.

You make me sad with your eyes. I'm not so sure it does. September is the sad month. January's melancholic, but because of its silence. Until it bursts into flames. The eyes of January look down on the fires of mid-month and on the beasties that roam the villages and towns spitting the sparklers of Sant Antoni. January, the curious month when fiesta has no right to occur but does so in an incendiary fashion that is more pyrotechnic than the summer fireworks; more pyrotechnic because houses, whole streets are in the line of fire.

The month's eyes cast a glance also at how the shorelines shift with the wind. Beaches' edges are moulded and sculpted by the sea's changes in direction and by the harvesting of marine crops that form bulges and mounds which, from a distance, appear as rocky outcrops newly exposed by displaced sand but are the abstract grotesques of packed seaweed and posidonia. The eyes watch as you bounce along the trampolines of the springy and spongy sand topped with its ocean scrap.

You're telling me lies. This is what makes you worry about January. It's what it's telling you about what's to come. It cascades from the skies at the stroke of the new year with the cheer of optimism, but it can be deceitful and deceiving. What's to come? The clear skies of January can just as easily become the dark clouds of gloom, but unlike an English January when you slowly count off the days to the onset of spring, here you might hope for its delay. January doesn't tarry though. It rushes in the spring and thoughts of the season with the swiftness and surprise of a bore racing along an estuary. Maybe it's an illusion, but no; the days are already longer. And then suddenly January's gone. Don't go, don't go.

Why would you not want it to go? January is non-month, it barely exists other than to be set light to. But this is what makes it the month that it is. Because when it's gone, the pretend time of fiesta and holiday from early December goes with it. And things begin to start all over again. The never-ending cycle and repetition of Mallorca's months and seasons.





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