It’s now 2022 – not 1 January but 2 January.
So why am I starting a day later than most to set my plans for the New Year?
Because many of us wake up on New Year’s Day with a determination to GET THINGS DONE. Mind you, if we shout it out loud like that it might hurt, especially if you welcomed in the New Year a little bit too well.
To be honest it is quite some time since my Muse and I welcomed the New Year in with alcoholic refreshment. If it wasn’t for Jools Holland and his annual Hootenanny we might not even have welcomed the New Year until it was about eight hours old.
But I digress.
The first day of the New Year should not be a time to make promises, it should be a time to evaluate the previous year and then decide whether to lay out a plan, only to be disappointed by failure within a few days, a fortnight at the latest, or establish a “take it as it happens” attitude and muddle our way through the rest of the year.
I am not saying that in one day I can examine everything that I have done in the previous 365 days. What I can do is consider what I hoped to achieve in that time and judge whether or not I achieved any part of it.
As it happens my Muse and I have succeeded in doing what we hoped to do in 2021 – we lived. We certainly lived to see in 2022.
That was not our aim at the start of 2020. We had all sorts of good things to look forward to: having days out to the seaside with our grandchildren; working on my Muse’s garden (well she would do the horticultural work and I would dig holes, make raised beds and perform other manual labour); lazing in the garden in the sunshine; visiting family in North Wales . . .
As we know now all these plans went to hell in a handcart thanks to Covid.
From March 2020 through to now we have just been grateful to wake up each day and survive to go to bed that night.
Thanks to the speedy work of scientists to come up with vaccines to help fight Covid our hopes of survival on 1 January 2021 were stronger than they had been in the middle of March 2020. On that New Year’s Day we had hopes that Covid would be over and done with before Christmas.
Thanks to the incompetence of the Boris Johnson government (and I’m not including Chris Whitty in that) we find ourselves entering another year with the threat of a new variant hanging over us, and who knows whether there will be another variant this year and in years to come.
That is why I am not making great plans for this year. Instead I will get up in the morning and decide day by day which jobs I will do around the house and garden; whether I’ll read a novel, a political volume or some poetry; maybe I’ll bake some bread or make cakes or sausage rolls; possibly work on the novels I have been working on for five years now; or maybe just write.
One thing I do plan to do (but cannot guarantee) is to put something of interest on this site at least once a day. Just don’t have a go if I fail. After all I’m only human.
PS: I spent yesterday knocking out a baker’s dozen of bread rolls.
Robin's Nest 