Songs Written in Empty Rooms

Snow falling again, but this time there is no novelty to it, as there was before Christmas. This is January snow; different, altered. I watched the white pool of light from a street lamp on the snow, bright, yet somehow darkening the night. Old roads stretching off into unseen distances, black hills surrounding town.

I have always had a fondness for January. There is a strange freedom away from the inelegant, vulgarities of summer, even from the easy, though beguiling, mysteries of autumn. January is everything stripped down, and naked, finally truthful, robbed of any complacent poetry. Last years masks are discarded and our neonate faces are raw, not quite hopeful, but the expelled histories of the last year, the last decade have left a cleanness.

The new notebook of January, waiting for that first mark, that first line, that first setting of the future.

The snow, now rid of the novelty, and because it has been mixed with rain, has formed a kind of slush, rather than the ice of December. It strikes me as both somehow antique, yet industrial, January produced in factories, mined in seams beneath nostalgic Earth; prison camp memories, bleak mornings in borstals, woke by guards before dawn, another day in the factories, a world in monochrome, stripped of colour.
Personal memories too, released by this bleak snow; of visiting Grandad Mole in hospital in 1981 with my Nan. Wolverhampton. Struggling through the snow to get back to my Nan's house. Nine years old, and loving the Pan Books of Horror Stories and Adam and the Ants; of 2002 (even though there was no snow that year), starting work at the petrol station, the long walk back after the late shift, along the black and empty Old Shoreham Road.

Still snowing out there.

I suppose we're all alone in January, left with ourselves and our dreams and nightmares. Not necessarily a bad thing. Like writing songs in empty rooms in abandoned houses, no-one else can hear us, but in that silence, we have, at least, the freedom to be ourselves.