Unresolved and Unravelling

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. It seems rather bizarre to me to suppose that my will and determination would be significantly stronger on any given date over any other. Neither do I see the point in waiting until the New Year to begin something – if one has already decided to do it, why wait?

The closest I came to a New Year resolution was to have a dry January, for economic and detox reasons to recover slightly from the excesses of the Christmas holidays. I admit I have fallen off the wagon to the tune of two pints thus far, (I made it six days, including New Year’s Day) I will not go in to the reasons, but I’m fine with them and still broadly sticking to the alcohol-free plan, despite continuing to be sorely tried by ongoing and, as yet, unresolved plumbing issues.

In fact, I’m doing rather well considering that January has been rather challenging, to say the least. In addition to the plumbing nightmare (now ongoing for over a month), I’ve been battling with my tax return (I really *must* resolve to keep my accounts up to date!), not to mention the depressingly dingy weather and misread the pattern which resulted in my having to frog back over 6″ of both sleeves (I knit two at a time) of my current project and I do find stocking stitch so very dull at the best of times. It’s enough to drive anyone to drink.

That said, before Christmas, I had resolved to read more poetry and also to try to write some. To this end, I began compiling an ebook of my favourite poems (written by others) using iBooks Author. Some are short, others are epic, but I aim to spend a little time with each and hope it will keep me busy and entertained for the year ahead. I had forgotten how much I used to enjoy poetry, particularly writing it and was surprised to find a selection of my early efforts (aged 8 and 9) among a pile of books I retrieved from my Mum’s house last week. Here’s one (you can probably tell I was a big fan of Edward Lear’s Nonsense Poems):

IF all the people lived in the sea
What funny people they would be

If the sea were made of sand
And all the fishes swam on land 

If the moon were made of cheese
And honey made the honeybees

If the piggies rules the sky
and watched the birds come flapping by

If all the animals made no sound
And the sun shone upwards from the ground

If all these things were really true
What funny things we’d have to do

All these things would really be
So silly to people like you and me.

There were little illustrations between each pair of lines and I must admit to being quite impressed with my 9yo self’s efforts 🙂

Of course, having said that I will make no New Year’s resolutions, I received my Christmas pressie from my friend Viv yesterday:

It’s gorgeous thing – a big, fat Gardener’s Journal with space for planning and scheming, logging your planting and harversting and snippets of useful information as well as a daily diary for logging your gardening activities…a 10 YEAR DIARY! Well, that’s the next decade’s worth of resolutions taken care of. Oh, the pressure! 😀