Counting My Blessings

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 17:09:34 +0100

Perhaps this New Year business works after all. Woke up to a bright, sunny day and was able to look back on a very pleasant New Year’s Eve spent in the bosom of my family. We ate too much, reflected on the relative merits of Cantonese duck as opposed to some other unspecified style of Chinese cuisine but we hadn’t reckoned on the proprietors putting on a New Year’s Eve disco. Fortunately the rest of the clientele hadn’t either since it only attracted one very small child running round in circles watched over by weary but admiring parents. Saw the New Year in over drinks with our long-standing friends and neighbours.

So I have to admit I felt a bit guilty about my grumpiness yesterday – I’ve got a loving family, two smart kids, a comfortable home, no financial or health worries – I’m a really lucky guy! And I was further chastened to read the comments on yesterday’s posting telling me as much – for which many thanks.

What is it though, that impulse inside us which tells us there’s something more, something we’re missing, that sense of being incomplete? Perhaps it’s just the need to keep searching that makes us human or maybe we’re just greedy. Oh well, got to go and pick up student daughter (20) from last night’s party. She phoned to say she’s just woken up! It’s raining now, as well…

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Out with the old, in with the new...

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:21:17 +0100

Well, here I am again, another New Year's Eve. The old isn't a problem - I feel old (goddam it, I am old), I can look back on another year of doing the same old stuff, and one look at the review of the year's news in today's newspaper leads me to speculate that our very civilization is itself growing terminally old.

So what's new? In the absence of anything better to do I thought I'd start this blog, the ramblings of a rather sad and increasingly grumpy old man crying out to the world from the comfortable and leafy English suburbs. As you may guess I've never blogged before, but I suppose it's the 21st century equivalent of those little diaries we used to get in Christmas stockings and which dutifully documented the events of the first few days of each year ("Got up. Played with my friends. Had sausages for tea"). So is my 2007 blog destined for an equally early demise? If anyone should read this perhaps they'd care to look in again in February to find out.

So let's set the tone straight away - tonight I am going out for a meal with my wife and two grown up (so they tell me) children. We are going to a Chinese buffet.........

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inside my head

Counting My Blessings

Out with the old, in with the new...