Reflections

On my Mind 4th December

Evening Walk. Little Eaton

December has always been a month of reflection for me.

In addition to being the end of a year and a time of dark nights, warm fires and family gatherings, it’s also my birthday month. A time for finding some unhurried space to think about what has gone well, what has not, what has been learned to position myself for the upcoming year.

This has been an extraordinary year.

We stumbled out of the isolation created by the pandemic to find a world that felt both familiar, but odd in the same way as we might meet a friend who’s been travelling and come back with new ideas and strange acquired habits. We have to get to know then anew, and find ways past the unfamiliar to the person we love.

Whilst we’ve been sheltering, the realities of Brexit have started to become clear, and the rhetoric and bluster of those whose interests it served have proven to be, well, rhetoric and bluster. We have seen the blusterer-in-chief resign, to be replaced by the favoured child of th…