The Last Post

 


I decided that I should make the last blog post of the year a significant one; one of great interest to humanity at large. The result of this has been me sitting at the keyboard for half an hour staring into space and occasionally touching a key when the screensaver came on. Why, I kept wondering, do we attach such significance to the turn of the year? I could understand if we still celebrated the pagan solstice 'New Year' as Spring begins in March. But why January 1st? Initially no one in the room could come up with a reason other than having a late night partying and getting a bank holiday. However, ideas eventually flowed as the morning cup of tea began to have its effect.

"You get a new calendar and if you made a mess of the old one it can be thrown away. It's like the feeling you got when you had a new exercise book in school."

"Old Filofax diary pages can be chucked and all the jobs that didn't get done can be binned." (An optimistic view of how life works I rather suspected).

"A lot of people use it as a focal point to make a new start, new resolutions, new plans... " "Aha," I responded, "so what resolutions have you made?"

"To finish tiling the bathroom," was one answer followed by "To start tiling the bathroom," from the more pedantic of the partnership. There then followed:-

"To record the species of bird which appear in our garden." (HJE)

"To record the books I've read." (IE)

Not to make resolutions - followed by "To do the things that are on my to do lists / go to gym / learn something about computers." (Jo).

These notes of the conversation were taken down in my usual shorthand in-between attempts to decipher a note on the back of my hand which appeared to read "Black AB". It was suggested that one of my resolutions should be not to make indecipherable notes whose meaning could be easily forgotten in the space of an hour. This ended up in my notes as "Write" which caused a certain amount of amusement! On a more serious note I decided to make a resolution to get my pastels out of the loft and do at least one painting this coming year.

At the end of the day this blog post has turned out to be neither significant nor of great interest - it has simply been a Ramble from my Chair....