Well hello to all of you. I hope you had a lovely Christmas, full of as much love and fun as mine. I didn’t mean to disappear from the blog for so long but sometimes life is just far too compelling.

And now it’s over.

Not my life. The Christmas part.

I’m not one of those people who is overtaken by glumness once the Boxing Day chocolates have been forcibly removed from my paws. Partly because there’s nowhere they can be taken that I won’t know where to find them. But really it’s because I adore this little stretch of time between Christmas and New Year.

It’s the airport of time.

I love airports. They’re full of people going somewhere; maybe going on holiday for the first time with a new lover, moving to a new life, or finally going to confront their mother about their awful childhood. The place is charged with anticipation. What will it be like when I get there? Will the hotel be nice? What if I hate the town I’m moving to? Will we fight? Will we make friends? Will I say what I mean to say?

And what is there to do in airports? You can shop certainly. You can eat too. But if you look around, you see a lot of people sitting. And maybe it’s been a long time since they were forced to simply stop, sit down and let their thoughts in. Perhaps they take the chance to sit and think, or to quietly talk to their loved ones in a way that can’t happen while they’re surrounded by the swirling detritus of normal life.

It’s a time of transit. Mental transit from here to there, which is a whole new year. There’s time for thinking over what you might or might not have accomplished in the last year, what surprised you, what pained you. Package it up, assess the lessons you learned, and figure out what you want to take with you into the next twelve months.

I don’t really do resolutions. Not in the traditional way of laying down a law for myself that I will surely break in three weeks, and then fall into a state of self-flagellation that will last until April. (Although it’s been three years since I drank coca cola, which is the only abstinence based resolution I’ve ever stuck to, but that’s because one day I realised I had no idea what was in it.)

But I have done some sitting and thinking, about how I hope my life will be, and what kind of things I want to make room for. I’m lucky enough to have a room of my own for the moment (though if we ever did manage to have any children I’d be turfed out of it :) and over the past year it’s been polarised: several months as a study, desk covered in books and papers while I dissertated, and then several months as a sewing nook, threads and pins everywhere.

But I do both writing and sewing. Or I want to do both. And sometimes I think the best way of signaling that a change is coming to your brain is to change your surroundings, so yesterday I dismantled my room and then put it back together again slightly differently. And cleaner. Much cleaner.

Quite literally, a new outlook.

I’m still in transit though, and still figuring things out, but feeling very content. How’s your transit going?

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