Into the New Year

Here I am in another year, with Christmas and New Year unbelievably in the past. Just before Christmas I drove to Queensland with some very good friends and their delightful 11 week old daughter, stopping off at Sawtell overnight on the way, which was a lovely way to make the journey home. Christmas lunch was a nice immediate family affair, with extended family dropping by later in the afternoon. Most of the rest of the week was spent lazing about with family, totally over-indulging on a selection of decadent foodstuffs and reading one of my Christmas books, Sophie's World. Fifteen years after it was published I decided it was time I read it. I haven't yet finished it, to reach any overall conclusions, but I have been quite fascinated thus far. One thing it has revealed to me that I am indeed a "romantic" in that “for many Romantics, philosophy, nature study, and poetry formed a synthesis. Sitting in your attic dashing off inspired verses [not that I do this very often] and investigating the life of plants or the composition of rocks were only two sides of the same coin because nature in not a dead mechanism ...” only I don’t base it on their premise of a universal “world spirit” but of a single creator. When I came to Kierkegaard things started to ring truer and I liked this sentence: “So we must therefore distinguish between the philosophical question of whether God exists and the individual’s relationship to the same question, a situation in which each and every man is utterly alone.”

One night we were at my Aunt and Uncle's for dinner, fortuitously, when their Japanese friends called to say they had tickets for themselves and some friends to Moreton Island the next day which they were unable to use and did my Aunt and Uncle know of anyone who could. So, my Mum and I, my sister, husband and two nieces had a day out doing Moreton Island Japanese-tourist style. We didn't know quite what we were in for but found ourselves on a 4WD tour, bumping around the bush and cruising along the beach in the back of a troop carrier, sand tobogganing on what are apparently the world's tallest sand dunes (which was loads of fun and the kids loved it - photo is me and my nieces setting off – if I am going to turn around and reveal all I am at least going to wear my large pterygium-prevention sunglasses :), unlike my poor nieces who can clearly see hardly anything), swimming in a beautiful fresh-water lagoon ... It was a great day out, which took me back to my past – out of that philosophy book and back into nature, reaffirming that "romantic" thing.

I decided we should have a birthday dinner for the January birthday's of my older sister and oldest niece (which I always miss) on New Year's Eve, which became a sleepover. After we’d all just about popped on my risotto and mud cake we sat down to watch my sister's birthday present, the BBC DVD of Elizabeth Gaskell's 'North and South', and the four hours took us nicely into the new year. Right on cue, as midnight fireworks exploded in the distance, Margaret and Thornton kissed - and the movie ended shortly thereafter and left us with our own lives to take into 2007. I really enjoyed it and think that all those of us who love period dramas need to watch it and be aware of what was happening beyond the drawing rooms.

Anyway, I shall keep most of my new year's resolutions a secret, but a friend did send me this “challenge to women”, from the Desiring God website, which I thought was a great way to begin.

And so, Happy New Year!