The Book of Months

A wonderful diary of a year in one mans life living in Edwardian Britain Excerpt: Thick yellow fog and in consequence electric light to dress by and breakfast by was the opening day of the year. Never to anyone who looks at this fact in the right spirit did a year dawn more characteristically. The denseness the utter inscrutability of the face of that which should be was never better typified. We blindly groped on the threshold of the future feeling here for a bell-handle here for a knocker while the door still stood shut. Then about mid-day sudden commotions shook the vapours; dim silhouettes of house-roofs promised lands perhaps or profiled wrecks stood suddenly out against swirling orange whirlpools of mist; and from my window which commanded a double view up and down Oxford Street I looked out over the crawling traffic with an interest as if in the unfolding of some dramatic plot on the battle of the skies. From sick dead yellow the colour changed to gray and for a few moments the street seemed lit by a dawn of April; then across the pearly tints came a sunbeam lighting them with sudden opalescence. Then the smoke from the house opposite which had been ascending slowly like a tired man climbing stairs was plucked away by a breeze and in two minutes the whole street was a blaze of primrose-coloured sunshine. All that week I was work-bound in London—a place where as everyone knows there are forty-eight hours in every twenty-four. The reason for this is obvious. It is impossible to sit idly in a chair in London; it is impossible (almost) to read a book and it is (happily) quite impossible to write one. Hence the hours are multiplied. The sound and spectacle of life induces a sort of intoxication of the mind. Ten yards of Piccadilly is a volume and the Circus an improper epic. Hence the impossibility of reading; the books are in the flowing tides that jostle from house-wall to house-wall and they are vastly more entertaining than anything that publishers have ever had the good fortune to bring out.