Assessing December

It has been a pretty frigid month. Not Alaska-like frigid but more frigid than it usually is around these parts. I loved every bit of it. Feeding the horses when they look like slow-motioned furry figures in a distance of frosty mist always is a fantastic sight, regardless of how used one may be to it. Spiders must have decamped to warmer climates and have abandoned their pretty mansions by the side of my drive. They may find that a hurricane has taken them down by the time they return, the darn critters.



Work-wise it has been slow, or perhaps I should say dreary. I am writing with a leaded-nibbed pen at the moment, so lamentable, hard and heavy my progress is. What can I say, apparently it is a given of writing life that one’s own last piece is the hardest one to write before the magnum opus is complete. Meanwhile, days have turned into weeks so fast that today is the last day of the month and the last day of the year and I feel like I am hanging by a silvery thread, walking on eggshells while balancing a tray of Bellinis on my egg-shaped head.

So much has happened over the past few months I wouldn’t even know how to resume 2008 and yet I feel obliged to do so, especially as I realised that the greatest thing about keeping a blog this year has been a fabulous diary I can now digitally leaf through, with many events, many very small, some much more important, all available to be juggled in memory at the click of the mouse. Squeak squeak squeak. I will think about 2008 next year. For now it is good-bye to what I proclaimed a ‘life-changing year’ on the first page of my Smythson diary as 2009 approaches through crackling, frosted leaves and a cold, cold night.