Another Year

I was all set for a quiet New Year's Eve catching up with housework but instead accepted an invitation to watch a concert in my friends' community cinema. It was Joyce di Donato singing some of Richard Strauss's most sublime songs, and how glad I was that I went. The woman has it all: gorgeous voice, extreme beauty, and a kind heart which causes her to work with refugees in camps and long-term prisoners all over the world. That she brings them joy, and hope, I don't doubt because she brings them to me in spades. One song, Wiegenlied, gave us all goose bumps, but the remembered cello solo didn't happen. As soon as I got home I fished out my CD to see if my memory was playing tricks on me, but the box was empty! I found it online without the cello. Here it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8G27O69ZWY

When I got home I planned to read my delicious book and go to bed at the normal time, sober as a judge, but I spotted a bottle of rose cava in the fridge and couldn't resist opening it. One glass was enough, but I did rather wallow in it. I made myself a cheese plate from all the leftover donations brought for Christmas, a selection of eight, and it felt like the best treat sitting by my cosy fire with the dog at my feet. The book is The Sheep Stell by Janet White, an account of a young woman becoming a shepherd and at one stage running her own farm of over a thousand ewes, rams and lambs on an offshore island in New Zealand, alone, intrepid and in heaven. She survived a vicious attack by a possessive boyfriend that left her nearly dead, and continued to farm in England with a large family in a freezing old farmhouse. I love her writing, and her descriptions of the countryside wherever she finds herself. She is intrepid, tough and brave, and I'm content to read about her life knowing I could never have had the courage to live it, yearn to as I might. Just my kind of book.

I drove home from lunch and an afternoon spent in Yoxford, with a massive harvest moon lighting up the sky. There are three in succession apparently, and they are incredibly striking. There was something about the combination of the moon and it being the first day of the new year that put me in a very philosophical frame of mind, and I felt very optimistic about the year to come, and the ones after that. Just being alive sometimes, with the added value of being in a beautiful place, is such a pleasure that problems or worries or slight misgivings can take a back seat for a while. The world feels so clean and pure up here. I didn't feel quite the same way a few hours earlier. As we drove back from a walk on Westleton Common, Hugo was crying in the back. It was odd, but the drive was short so I ignored him. Imagine my dismay, no horror, when I found that the metal extension lead which I'd foolishly left attached to him had wrapped itself round and round his leg as he turned in circles, pulling tighter and tighter as he struggled. You only make these mistakes once, and he was none the worse though I feared the leg might have gone temporarily numb. Chastened and relieved, I freed him and hugged him to apologise. And of course he forgave me.