Wrap

Each moment might be a moment of revelation, but most are not. Epiphanies. The sense of things being hidden rather than revealed, as if they were presents with almost recognisable shapes, wrapped in enticing paper. But you can't quite recognise them, and you can't unwrap them - tantalising, out of reach.

The repetition of dates, months, seasons. Every year has its 30th of December, and every year it's dark at 4.30 and there's always a Christmas tree twinkling in a darkened room downstairs, when everyone is in other rooms.  The year is dying. Always at this time. So many other December 30ths underlay this one that it is hard to believe in its specific reality. It's a December 30th. But it's truly this December 30th. This one is a one-off, unique. This Christmas too, but Christmas is so overdetermined, it can never be just this Christmas. It comes with the massive pass the parcel weight of each year's wrapping paper - the music stops on December 25th, and you add another layer. 2011. So you can never remember what was inside the parcel, under all the paper - what Christmas was when it was new, unwrapped, naked.

Loose Ends

Picking up the year's loose ends and trying to tuck them in, or trace them back or trim them off. The fire is fierce and hot, and there are sensible jobs to be done as well as dreaming, reading, eating, walking. I take the pieces of paper out of my in-tray basket, one at a time, and consider them. There's nothing overdue or overlooked, and I can see where to put most of them away. Relief. Next the drawer that is my other in-tray!

Begin

Ooh err, suddenly I'm in the new look Blogger set-up. I may have tentatively clicked something, but I hadn't really contemplated such a big change. Yes, I am a creature of habit, fond of the familiar. Be still my racing heart, all is well...

Afternoon, just beginning to grow dark, though it has not been very light all day, mist and rain prevailing, warmer than recently, patches of snow and ice melting steadily in the downpour. The tops are no longer visible, a shroud of fog closing in just beyond the stand of poplars perhaps 100 yards away. A dog barks outside the post office, its voice deep, its tone agitated, fast, frequent barks of displeasure.

My intercostal muscles and diaphragm are tender from coughing. From time to time I misinterpret what I'm feeling as indigestion. This cold, or virus, or whatever it should properly be called, is a mean and moody shape-shifter, and is currently in the coughing and nose-blowing phase. I've run through nearly an entire box of balsam tissues enriched with soothing aloe vera. This phase also involves being awake from 3 or 4am. Tiring. I get up after a time, and make a fresh hot water bottle and a cup of camomile tea with honey, take them back to bed, read, and, if the cough will loosen its grip, eventually get some more sleep around 6 or 7. It's hard work, but I don't feel actually ill. I swear sometimes and grumble, and get exasperated when I knock my glass of water over, when reaching for the light. But I am not unhappy. No. Under the veil of this cold, I sense I am returning to myself, feel the stirrings of enormous energy and connection. I have a sense that at last, after a long time of feeling it was all over, I can begin (again). You wouldn't believe how many times I've written and rewritten the last two sentences. This is not easy to put into words...

Holly

We walked down the frozen field, the sky birthday blue, to a holly bush near a stile, sheep gathering on the ridge almost yellow in the angled light. Each with a pair of secateurs, we cut sprigs of holly heavy with red berries in great clusters, filled our two supermarket bags. Glad, we walked up the next field, singing deck the halls and talking about being jolly, jollity, jollification...

And on the way back over the cobbles near Mitchell Brothers Mill, having taken L's word that it really wasn't slippery, my feet suddenly slid away from under me, and somehow, through sheer instinct and the miracle of semicircular canals, and a measure of luck, I managed to stay upright, walking on laughing, my legs shaking, my stomach newly turned.

Bob Barks

It was a false dawn, the virus had not finished with me and now here I am in pyjamas with an intermittently functional voice, and a head heavy with cold. And yet and yet... this week I have felt the stirrings of a kind of ecstasy in being alive that I had, I think this is true, forgotten.

Bob, the dog next door, barks. There is mist over the tops, and a delicate dusting (I can think of no other word) of snow over the higher fields, like icing sugar on a cake, the green still entirely visible, its tone muted. Every now and then, a snowflake falls slowly past the window. They have the look of the seeds of willow herb in early autumn, floating and unhurried.

I am 'off sick', officially excused from all activity today. And L is on her way down to London for a retirement party at the school where she used to work. In a sense it's the retirement party she never had, the collapsed school where she ended her career unable to celebrate and honour her as she deserved. A travesty. So, I am alone, and enjoying the warm house, my pyjamas, lots of tea, and the freedom to return to bed for a spell later on if I feel like it.

Sleep, Tom, Signs

My throat hurt indescribably for less than 24 hours, then I slept about 15 out of the next 24. Now a bit snuffly, a bit tired, but sort of ok. I liked having permission to spend a lot of time in bed, and let go some of the activity of the week. This on the back of a challenging visit to my mother's.

On the way home on the train, in ecstasy listening to Tom Waits' Real Gone on the MP3

I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

I'm gonna take the sins of my brother

down to the pond

I'm gonna wash them...

til the water runs clear

Driving home in the near dark today, a red temporary traffic light shines out, above a red sign with white lettering saying when red light shows wait here, and one of those white arrows on a blue background to tell you to go round the obstacle not plough straight into it. Reflecting the red of the traffic light. The wet road, the stillness of stopping after hurtling along, and these traffic signs shining out their meanings to whoever happens to be there to see them. Something about that blue and that red that excite me today exactly as they did as a child being driven at night, or on winter's afternoons.

Who Needs TV?

The wood burner ticks intermittently as it heats up, and now begins to cool again, as I let it go for the night. I am learning its voice, its needs, its ways. I stare for long minutes into the silvered glow of the consuming logs, breaking down into cuboid glowing chunks of fire red fire orange. Something almost tactile in the pleasure of looking, alongside the frightening knowledge of the harm touching would do. Flames lick upwards.

Outside snow.