Happy New Year

Last night's event at the pub involved some very loud fireworks, of which I got some good shots, and a chat with a man who turned out to be the organiser of several well known folk festivals. None of theseI've ever attended, apart from Wychwood, which seems to be turning more and more into Waitrose!

We stood on the deck outside the pub, and then retreated to a ledge while the whizz bangs went off, and then, all of a sudden, the evening was made for me by a group of young people singing beautifully, in harmony. It was dare I say, less drunken, more poetic singing than I have encountered elsewhere on New Year's eve! The man we'd been chatting to started to receive a flurry of romantic texts from a woman he'd met only the night before, who was by then in London. I wished them both well, and went home and fell asleep with my head on Bomble, who was insisting on crowding me off my own pillow!

After a most delicious sleep I awoke to bright sunlight and no CleanSteve! He'd already departed to the sun lounge dining room so I joined him there and caught the end of Woman's hour, at which point I learned that all four Cazalet chronicles are being broadcast in serial form this year. These books, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, are much loved by my sister TML and I, after she discovered Volume 1 many years ago at a jumble sale on Easdale island, where we had gone to see the garden of artist Joy Blakeney. The first part, The Light Years, which deals with the fortunes of an upper class English extended family on the eve of WWII, started this week. Something to look forward to every day!

CleanSteve and I decided to take advantage of the light and go for a very short walk on Painswick Beacon, an Iron age hill fort from which seven counties are visible: Gloucestershire, South Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, and Herfordshire. This tree and blipper are located in Gloucestershire! Evidence of the floods was all around us, and I've had fun inventing a little lake under Steve's feet, and flipping the image, just because I can! I liked the symmetry of the two couples, too.

On the way back I stopped to check out Gyde house, a former children's home, now converted into private flats. It is a lovely old building, with a long driveway, on the outskirts of the elegant village of Painswick. It will make a good blip subject for another day, but I felt it important to start the year with a simple "my day" shot rather than launching into another project about a former institution (this one was by no means a cruel and heartless place, unlike the Stroud workhouse of recent blips).

Incidentally, I had no memory of our New Year last year, so concluded that either I am entering dementia in my 40s, or that it had been spectacularly dull! I checked CleanSteve's blips for hogmanay and New Year's day of a year ago, and found that it was all about jigsaws! Dear God, what with my emergency jigblip of yesterday, it seems to me we have come to the age of Cardigans.
And Slippers.
And cocoa.

Long live jigsaws rock and roll! Happy New year, everyone, everywhere.