Janus
A little note on looking forward and looking back
I’ve never been very good with my Ancient Greek or Roman gods. I could never keep the differences between them in my head, or remember who was the god of what. Mostly my knowledge is piecemeal, any stories I’ve remembered through the work of other people: Joyce taught me about Daedulus through the main character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Brueghel’s painting of Icarus and Auden’s response in his poem Musee des Beaux Arts gave shape and pathos to that journey too close to the sun. Those old stories were refreshed in my mind by the gloss given to them by other writers.
In spite of my patchy knowledge, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Roman god Janus, after whom we take the name of the first month of the year, January. Janus has two faces, one that looks forward, and one that looks back, and is the god of doors and transitions.
January then is a hinge, between what has come before and what will come to be. Of course, seeing January in this way is hardly novel, whether you know the god after which the month is named or not. Still, I’ve always been moved by this figure, and this name. It makes the month of January seem less melancholy somehow, that it allows us to ease into a new year by still having a foot in the old one.
These early days of 2026 have been tricky in my house, as we negotiate flu and feeling glum. The second half of last year was, truth be told, pretty tricky too, as I dealt with redundancy and the crumbling of the Higher Education sector in the UK, as well writing many, many job applications. And yet my first book was also published in September 2025, and my son started producing the most extraordinary sentences (whispering ‘Mummy, what’s your favourite creature?’ in the middle of the night). And, though the first few days of the new year have been filled with calpol, Cars 3, and delivered Christmas leftovers from my parents, today, when the thickest snowflakes, almost comically large and fluffy, came down outside of our window and we watched in the warm, a little lightness emerged in my mood.
The future for me is always couched in uncertainty, a feeling I have spent much of adult life trying to come to terms with. Few things are a given. But I’m hoping that this year, I can talk with some security about a couple of things: The Writer’s Room will be published in the US and Canada by Princeton University Press in February. Any readers based in North America you can pre-order it here. I have some exciting book festival appearances coming up, and hopefully some other events too. I’m also working on an idea for a new book, an idea I’m really passionate about - keep an eye out for some posts about this in the future!
And yet, in my thinking about the next few months, I find I’m not quite ready to let go of last year, still searching for residual meaning. For this month I think I’ll be reflecting on 2025, what it meant and how (and if) I changed. And then at some point, when a little more time has passed, the push-and-pull between this year and the last, will melt, as the snow did, and I’ll settle into another year.