I did my review of the year a couple of weeks ago, so I don't want to rehash that. But there's something about Decembers that makes you introspective, I think, even in the best of times (which this is clearly not).

Last December I reflected (cautiously) on the happiness that this new non-working phase of my life had brought me. This year... Well, it's all much more complicated, isn't it?

For a lot of the time, life has felt like this:


Things have fallen apart, are not functioning as they should, are a shadow of their former selves, look pretty forlorn...

And while I am grateful (really grateful) to still be here, I'm torn between two contradictory feelings.

On the one hand, I can't entirely shake the feeling that the whole damn year has been a colossal waste of time...

This blog was supposed to be about our long-awaited Big OE. It wasn't supposed to consist mostly of a succession of travel-substitutes: "shadow journeys", theme days, kitchen experiments, indoor entertainment, continually repeated pacings in a really small area...

On the other hand, I think: How privileged we were to be able to get so well acquainted with that little corner of Norfolk where we washed up in March. How privileged we are now to live in such an interesting city, and (restrictions permitting) be able to do the occasional road trip.

These two mindsets fight it out in my brain on a regular basis, which is kind of exhausting...


I think the dark and light mindsets fight it out through the medium of my blog posts, too. Counting this one, I'll have done 171 PT posts this year, which is not that many fewer than last year's 183. What on EARTH have I been writing about...?


And, symptomatically, I think, I've taken to doing photos that have just a little bit of purple in them...






The Velvet Cushion has had a good year, not surprisingly, given all the non-travelling time we've had at our disposal for reading, viewing, and other cerebral pursuits. Compared with eight posts last year, I've done 25 this year... December alone produced three, with reflections on travel, on our now much more varied TV diet, and on Sunjeev Sahota's excellent novel, The Year of the Runaways.


Vintage Travel, which saw the light of day in April, boasts 11 posts so far, including one from December (on Iceland). Vintage Travel is a bit of a mixed bag, and one of my ambitions for next year is to do it better. (Needless to say, I'd like to improve the writing in all my blogs, but Vintage Travel is the one where I still feel I haven't consistently found the right tone.)




So, it's been a strange year, in which happiness has had to be worked at and fought for; in which writing-for-processing has largely taken the place of writing-for-documenting; in which living-for-the-present-moment has become inevitable but has not necessarily brought the calm that you might expect from such a practice.

But if I focus just on December, I have to admit it has in many ways been a really good month.

We did an absolutely awesome road trip (the relevant posts start here). This is the closest we've come to "travelling" for a really long time, and I enjoyed it to the max.





Towards the end of January, we'll try to get out of town again. Depending on the weather, depending on the Spikes-meter... One of the things that regularly drags me down is the complete impossibility of planning anything.





And there's been Christmas, which we've gone in for in a big way this year.


So... this is the last post in a highly complex and trying year. We have lots planned for our celebration (at home) this evening, but it's the first of next year's posts that will cover that.

In the meantime, if you're surrounded by walls, may they be purple ones:


And while we have no doves, we have a pink-necked green pigeon, who we hope will bring you peace in 2021: