By Frampton Jones

I always have to remind myself that a love of darkness in a shipwrecked resident is not the same as a love of darkness in someone who grew up here. It takes newcomers a while to realise that the beloved velvet darkness of home, with all its charm and whimsy, is not to be found here. Our darkness is full of teeth and eyes, and hunger.

The shift from one calendar year to another generally causes fights. At the moment, the most popular choices of date for next year are 1837, 1896, 1924 and 2215. This is why our consensus about the year recently has gone 1846, 1923, 1860 with last year rather confusingly being 1492. We all keep our own calendars in practice, it may be best that way. And so last night we passed from one calendar year to another, and some of us felt the need to get drunk and punch each other over this, as is traditional.

John Kokkonakis apparently felt the need to celebrate midnight outdoors. I’ve seen this before, and it seldom goes well. People who expect the darkness to be full of merry bells and neighbourly good cheer are always disappointed. Sometimes, I rather suppose the darkness embraces them, instead.

Knowing John’s birth sign, I shall have to re-write the horroscopes for this year, as I firmly believe the prediction of death by nostalgia in the night was meant for him. We’ll just have to see what’s in store for the person most likely to die, who shares his birth sign.

And so we have another obituary in which the departee always claimed to have been born in what I consider the future, and whose year of death is equally impossible to pin down. Years are cruel, unreasonable entities, we should not trust them, and it is clearly unsafe to try and celebrate their capricious comings and goings.