It doesn’t feel like 2004. It doesn’t even feel like 2003, but I suppose we’ll all just have to cope. It’s going well so far; what could be better than watching seven episodes of Friends (season one, no less) in bed and having someone else cook breakfast for you? I’m writing this sitting on an unusually pleasant train ride back to Liverpool.
I spent my New Year’s Eve in Leeds at a friend’s house party which was good fun, especially due to the entirely unexpected five inches of snow that fell overnight. I haven’t had such a great snowball fight for years; there must have been dozens of people out in the street forming lines of artillery and raiding parties.
A few days ago I was out walking around the marine lake near my home in West Kirby. It’s a little under two miles to walk around the entire lake and for the most part, the path is only a few metres wide and half a metre above the water. This means that on days like this one, where the sky was achingly blue and crisp, and there was not a trace of wind in the air, you can stand on the path and feel like you’re floating in space, with blue skies and water all around you. See photos of a reflection, an arcing path and the sunset.
I miss the water and shore when I’m at Oxford. When the weather was more amenable, I used to run along the river Isis for a few miles every week and I could get my fix water then, but there is little that compares to the looking out over an expanse of water that reaches as far as the eye can see. There’s probably a thousand different evolutionary psychological reasons why we humans love living along the shore and looking at the water, but in this case I don’t want to unweave the rainbow.
I’ve never really gone for New Year’s resolutions; if there’s something I want to do (or stop doing) that I feel is achievable, then making a resolution isn’t going to make any difference. This year though, if I were to make my first resolution, it would be to untangle the complicated and occasionally depressing web that my personal life is gradually becoming.
mssv 
