Happy New Year

Subject: Happy New year.

So it's New Years Eve again, another year gone of the allotted time span, a year in which Brexit looms ever larger, with ever increasingly hysterical reporting about the doom ladened events which will occurs if and when we leave the safe harbour of the EU.
For me it's been a year of 'steady as she goes', negotiating the inevitable medical mishaps associated with old age, the trials of an unappreciated body which was left to motor on without any oil change or plug replacement, slowly starting to show its age. 
I resolutely refuse to acknowledge the benefits of exercise, assuming that inactivity has as many advantages as rigorous activity, and leaving aside all those doom Sayers who would have us out in all weathers, it seems to me that it's a little ingenious to throw away all those carefully cultivated years of sloth for a final tilt at exercise to stave of a premature end.
With the family, like so many these days atomised across the globe the internet allows us perhaps even more interaction as we throw into the discursive mix perl's of opinion dressed up as fact since we know we will not be interrogated as in a face to face conversation where philosophical opinion is given short shrift in preference for the practicality of independent bias. One of course does miss the pleasure of standing back and watching the product of your loins grow into throughly likeable people, clearly without much recent help, other than the 'genetic plasticine' you initiated all those years ago which has since been prodded and squeezed into the attractive shape you see today.
Where will next years New Years Eve find us, if at all. Will we be merely a photo on the mantelpiece an object gathering dust, a memory of what might have been, or will we still be on the list for a Christmas card. Will we once again be identified by the number of medical, appointments in our diary, and a constant worry for the kids who see their role as providing a backstop to a rapidly disintegrating NHS. The purple rinse set and a bungalow by the sea at Clacton, the daily stroll along the prom, a macabre routine as purposeful as ones inevitable demise. Is this the picture postcard we have become, a picture we would never have thought of as us, caught in that pause between life and death.

A more chilling thought is how many blogs lie ahead before the pen runs out of ink. That trail of verbiage, some would say garbage stretching back to 2012, an almost daily commentary on life as seen by one individual. Trying to delve behind the edifice we all present, questioning and cheering from the sidelines has been a throughly pleasurable exercise although perhaps for many, one in which the energy could have been used elsewhere. Every year I get them bound into a book with an appropriate photograph to enhance the storyline. It's interesting to recapture the sense of the 'moment' which stimulated writing my my thoughts down in the first place.

The blog address from which the book is drawn is :- twocents2012.blogspot.com

It has the title Random Thoughts.