I’m not saying Happy New Year to you, again, although now that I’ve mentioned it, I actually do, again. No, what I have in mind is that today feels like my New Year has, at last, begun.
I always tell people that I like a quiet Christmas and a quiet New Year, but it seldom turns out that way, and it did not this time around. This was not because I got lots of appalling demands to attend appalling things. If they had been appalling demands and appalling things, then I would have happily played them all off against each other and ignored the whole damn lot of them. No, the problem was: enticing requests to attend enticing things, frequented by enticing people whom I might not soon be meeting again, things that I knew I would enjoy and which I did mostly enjoy, hugely, but which just came one after another. (Plus, I arranged an event myself at my home, on the last Friday of December.)
And then, in the midst of it all there was that dose of Ashes Lag, to play havoc with the already imperfect sleep pattern. The point of such fill-in-the-blank lags is that it only takes one such night of lag to create a ripple lasting about a week. Throw into that mix a few invites to things that happened not in the evening but earlier in the day, and it all became pretty strenuous.
But now, all these events have come and gone. I had a huge sleep last night and way into this morning, and finally feel able to think about the year ahead rather than just the next thing I need to get to.
So like I say: Happy New Year.