Of ends, finishes and termini

December the first.  Huzzah!  Already the month is getting off to a pleasant start: I have some excellent applicants for a PhD position (and still more to sift through), my long-standing grief with a particular action editor may be coming to an end (if the politeness of his last email is anything to go by), and the effects keep rolling in more or less as expected (as long as I stay on the data fairies' good side, of course).

December is always an odd month for academic work.  Lectures finish up two or three weeks in, which leaves some time for winding things up before the obligatory xmas break.  The university shuts up shop for over a week, from before xmas eve until after new year's day (completely: bolts on doors, etc.).  Many people start to drift back to work a few days into January, but the place stays quiet until at least mid-month as people work from home, travel to interesting places, and do whatever they have the freedom to do before lectures recommence.

The net effect is that December is seen as a time of winding down.  The evenings close in and precious daylight begins to disappear ever earlier in the afternoon.  Mornings increasingly involve switching off the lights before leaving the house.  On good weather days, the sun is so low in the sky that long shadows lean across the street even at noon.  On bad weather days, the quality of the light is so grey and flat that everyone looks a little ill.  Sending cards and shopping for pressies - even for those of us with the religious convictions of a pastafarian -  becomes a welcome diversion even as it occupies mind-space previously reserved for experimental design and grant planning.

Everything is geared towards getting things finished in December.  The idea of starting a new project in December seems faintly ludicrous.

Perhaps this is the one time that academic time-keeping is in sync with the real world.  After all, everyone else thinks of December as the end of one year and January as the start of the next one (our little foible of describing September as "the start of the year" is best kept to ourselves).  There's something aesthetically pleasing in considering the death of a year as happening in the cold and dark of December.  And, perhaps, it's in the cold and dark that we most need the reinvigoration of a fresh year starting anew.