Bear Faced Bloggery

 ...and just like that, another year draws to its close.  I can scarcely believe that in just a couple of months I will have completed my second year as a widower... a year which, though slightly less emotionally fragile than the last, has nonetheless been jagged with grief. I feel my loss as acutely as ever, though life has expanded around it, subsuming it into the warp and weft of everyday existence. I am working more, I am writing again, I am filling my time with the minutiae of daily life to such an extent that, to the casual observer, I would seem to be little different from the person I was prior to the terrible events of Easter 2023.  But the casual observer would be wrong.  If they were only to look a little more closely they would see the continuing sadness behind my eyes, feel the pain of loss that hangs heavy on my heart, and perhaps begin to get some inkling of my daily struggle to keep going. Reading back my blog from this time last year, I can see that ...

 The year is turning... 2023 becomes 2024 in a single tick of the clock... yet nothing changes, for all our drunken resolutions and best intentions. Everything that occupies our hearts and minds on December 31st will still be foremost in our thoughts on January 1st. The same wars will rage, the same injustices perpetrated. Joy and sorrow, violence and frustration, love and loss, depression and anguish... they will all run on from one day into the next, across the dateline that separates the old year from the new.  Jolly little soul aren't I? January is, of course, named for the two-faced god Janus - not two-faced in our modern sense, but able to see simultaneously forward and backward, and so it is natural that New Year's Eve should be a time of both reflection and anticipation. For those that know me, or follow this intermittent blog, you will understand that 2023 has been a year that I am all too happy to put behind me, and any reflection that I may be engaged in as the worl...