44.

Dec.20th.


I'm sitting on an old elephant leg of a sweet chestnut stump. It is my last contact with my little heaven until the new year and it is not far off a year since I began this journal. The sun still shines, although weaker today. It filters through the twig canopy, dances around my boots where the deep, red brown leaf litter folds into them and touches me to contemplate my luck at not being in the pre Christmas, trench life of the streets. I soon will be.

I have come to realise that depression does not swoop romantically like some enveloping cloak, some poetic miasma; rather it is triggered in my case, by loss, change and weather! So I have made the biggest change I could, to shake it by the horns. I'm obviously driven by ‘projects’. I fear to think what I will be like when I can’t take them on.

The longest night approaches,-- the winter solstice. I find this infinitely cheering. Snowdrop and daffodil shoots are appearing under the plum trees, where I planted some two autumns past, to mix with the old originals.

England calls and I'm off to be enveloped by family and the manicured patterns of familiar landscape.