Why January is a great month

It takes quite something to beat January in these parts. It’s hot, the beach is irresistable, the days are long, the sun shines. But beyond that January has a distinct feel – the relaxed, mind-is-elsewhere, do-it-next-week feel. It matters little whether you are actually on holiday, having begun some time before Christmas, or whether you are back at ‘work’. For instance:

I walk into  main office and ask about something or other for which I’ve been waiting. The person behind the desk is reading a worn paperback, totally absorbed. She looks up at me blankly and takes quite a while to focus. ‘Oh, I think it’s on order but there’s a bit of a delay. Might be a couple of weeks’.

Someone calls me from Melbourne about a talk and radio stint at the end of the month. He is just back at work, has the dates wrong, forgets my name, has over 280 emails to deal with. ‘Why don’t you just hit mass delete?’ I suggest. ‘If anything is important, you’ll get another email’. ‘What a wonderful idea’, he says.

And then you have the ‘shutdown’. Many places simply shut everything down before Christmas and then open again around epiphany. Computers don’t work, doors are locked, no-one responds to anything. But is this counted as part of your holidays? Not at all all: four weeks holiday are on top of the two-week shutdown.

 

From my study window at night

By this time of the evening I am in a comfy chair reading, looking out over the harbour, getting up to grab some second-hand binoculars acquired at the Berlin flee-markets to check out the name and structure and crew of the latest ship leaving or entering the harbour (that’s a navigation tower in the centre).

 

Lenin’s approach to freedom of assembly: restaurants, tea-rooms, beer-halls and shooting galleries

After the 1905 revolution, the tsar granted limited freedom of assembly, speech and the press. So Lenin, knowing full well the advantages of this new situation for socialist organisation, proposes the following:

It is high time, furthermore, to take steps to establish local economic strong points, so to speak, for the workers’ Social-Democratic organisations – in the form of restaurants, tea-rooms, beer-halls, libraries, reading-rooms, shooting galleries, etc., etc., maintained by Party members (Collected Works 10, p. 35).

Makes you want to ask where the socialist restaurants, tea-rooms, beer-halls are today. Are we missing something? Of course, shooting galleries had another purpose, as he points out in a footnote:

I do not know the Russian equivalent of tir [French], by which I mean a place for target practice, where there is a supply of all kinds of fire-arms and where anyone may for a small fee practise shooting at a target with a revolver or rifle. Freedom of assembly and association has been proclaimed in Russia. Citizens have the right to assemble and to learn bow to shoot; this can present no danger to anyone. In any big European city you will find such shooting galleries open to all, situated in basements, sometimes outside the city, etc. And it is very far from useless for the workers to learn how to shoot and how to handle arms.