As the minutes tick down until the end of December, I find myself once again resetting and archiving the talk page for my Wikipedia account, which I have already done on ten occasions before.

Some people think of time as a straight line, others as a circle. I have come to compromise by thinking of time as helical. The turn can be conceived of as lasting, hours, days, months, years or even centuries. Sitting at my computer desk now, ready to perform the same routine again, I find that the manoeuvre is ready in my muscle memory. It almost feels as if mere minutes have passed since I did this on 31 December 2023, or 2022, or 2021…

Conversely, events from earlier this year – such as the general election or the D-Day commemorations – feel a lifetime away. Perhaps the cycle of the seasons is to blame; by July it can be easy to forget the feeling of cold and darkness, and by January equally hard to remember the feeling of warmth and sunlight. Habits, timetables, wardrobes all change accordingly so that we almost inhabit two different selves with little knowledge of each other.

Christmas intensifies this effect, given the disappearance and reappearance of the same decorations each year, as well as the propensity of television and radio to endlessly rerun the same seasonal songs and specials. What’s more, Christmas is often a bit between, when work and school temporarily shut down. Once the rush of shopping for Christmas Day itself concludes, we find ourselves in the awkward denouement, the anticlimactic final week of the year when nothing much happens, which gives us time to reflect. It can all be a bit disorienting and existential, really.

What a strange phenomenon it is that memory and perception should vary in this way – over and over there will be weeks, days or even individual hours which feel excruciatingly long, yet somehow the year as a whole can go in no time at all.