I see that Happy New Year is flagged up, though I’m glad you point it out because the writing is so tiny that otherwise I’d have to have my nose rubbed in the coarse jute of the flag in order to be made aware of the greeting. This is a moment of endings and beginnings, a time to remember to remember absent friends and how it is in the nature of things that friendship is the warp and weft, the coarse and the not so coarse fabric that keeps me afloat. Even in absence it is precisely those threads that create order within the random and ramshackle universe, the tendency towards entropy and chaos; those threads that keep my head above the waves of dissolution, keep me interested, keep me looking forward. OK, and what do I (we) have to look forward to?
Well, there’s this blog, the attempts at dialogue, the reading, the interrogation of text, interpretation and play – and always the looming deadline – and what will be the next sentence to emerge. What are you going to come up with next? Whatever it is, you can be sure that I will never have heard of it. And that’s the point – pushing towards the edge, never knowing what fragments of near incoherence will enable a few more steps to be taken – forwards, backwards or sideways. Journeying in the wilderness is never going to be easy or straightforward. The image may be the Dartmoor wilderness or the urban wilderness of the world’s great cities, but it remains the stuff we are given to struggle with, the constant interplay of inner and outer, darkness and light, the play of shadows. This is our territory and it is worth both marking and celebrating as the old year dies and we await the birth of the new.