Happy New Year

At the start of this year I blogged a bit of a moan about how I hated leaving an old year behind, one into which I’d grown comfortable, and how suddenly – after the short period of reality-denial called Christmas – I had to plunge into a new, cold, bleak, year and build everything up again.

Well, here we are again, and this time I don’t feel quite so bad. Rather, I’m glad to be putting a bad year behind, and hoping for some fresh chances in the new one. On a personal level, 2018 was a year of sadness and loss, frustration, failure and fatigue (though I did enjoy the long hot summer). On a public level, well, I try to keep politics out of these blogs, but the world is hardly in a happy state, is it. Depression, anxiety, boredom, apathy and anger should not be healthy, rational, everyday responses to how things are, but it is so. And that’s before we think about jumping off the white cliffs 

on 29th March.

So the opportunity for a new start is always to be welcomed. An artificial contrivance, like a date – January 1st, say – is always a good catalyst for a change of mood.

I recall, as a child at this time of year, being encouraged (a) to write “thank you letters” and (b) to make New Year Resolutions. The former was a creative challenge; what would be a really respectable intended use for a five shilling postal order? The latter sounded very grown-up and tedious, but I had my own response, which might take the form of tidying up the big flat Kodak film box in which I kept my Meccano parts. Having done so, and organised my trunnions and angle girders, I would resolve that this year constructional activity was going to be different, and I would build something bigger and better than before. And so, one fine morning, before school re-started, I would settle down on the living room floor to build the Forth Bridge. Not full size, obviously, no, just to a reasonable, modest scale. By around half past nine I would have run out of parts, and life would continue exactly as before. If only I’d thought of building HS2; it would probably be finished by now.

 
Happy New Year.