In many ways this has been an awesome month.

We've been really pretty lucky with the winter weather (so far, at least -- I'm not counting any chickens...). And the days are perceptibly stretching. Today in Newark the sun got up at 07.48 and is not planning to retire until 16.45, so we've really moved on since the solstice. We've seen quite a few snowdrops. And tomorrow is not only the feast of St Brigid, or Imbolc, marking the first day of the Celtic spring, but it's also the first day of the Year of the Tiger. New beginnings ahoy!


We've visited lots of really interesting places this month. (They've resulted in a grand total of 19 PT posts, a quantity unmatched since October 2020. Start here, and work forward.) One of the really great things about the UK is the plethora of public footpaths. OK, they don't always make for easy going at the moment (if I lived here, I'd invest in wellies), but they offer a treasure-trove of little adventures.

And then there's cheese, which is in a pleasure category all of its own... In honour of our recent excursion to Lincolnshire, we used our latest raid on Newark market's cheese stall to acquire some fine specimens from that county, plus one or two outliers:



So that's all good.


On the other side of the ledger, we had a bit of a scare when Nigel developed some mystery illness (he seems to be getting better). It's stressful being ill here at the moment, not only because there's an anxiety about the person we're staying with, but also because it's so damn difficult to access medical care...

Another negative -- exactly as was the case when I wrote last month's review -- is that we still have no clarity on what we're doing after our projected trip to the Isle of Man (in preparation for which expedition, we yesterday applied for and today received our "Vaccination Exemption" and "Manx Entry Permit").

We'd been thinking of going to Ireland, but then I realized that would involve dealing with the covid regimes in place in Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as Eire, and even though they're all part of the Common Travel Area, they all have different approaches, and I don't know if I can be bothered... Maybe things will change. Or maybe I'll come up with another plan. We'll see... I'm easily discouraged at the moment, and we might just give up and go home in early April. Trouble is, although Omicron is now starting to invade Peninsula Malaysia, it hasn't made it to Sarawak yet, and I really don't want to be arriving just as they're locking down again. Been there, done that. Three times.

When we embarked on this trip, we had hoped that things would by now have eased, but Omicron has upended that expectation, and it still feels as though we're in the thick of it, despite the UK government's bizarrely gung-ho approach. And, again contrary to expectations, we still have to apply for permission to return to Sarawak. Everyone had thought we'd have open borders again by now, but I can understand why they're holding off.


I know... First World problems... At least we have a home to go to, and the wherewithal to contemplate options.

But it's tedious and energy-sapping all the same.


I'd hoped to be writing about resolutions by now. By the end of January, you've usually figured out something about what you want to do with the year, and how that's going, no? But I'm postponing this discussion. On the one hand, I have no control over anything at the moment, as I've just explained, and on the other hand, I'm in the middle of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I'm sure I'll post on this in the near future, but for the moment the take-home point is that you can't do everything, and it really doesn't matter...

A propos of posts about books, there have been just two this month, on Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Nottinghamshire author Alan Sillitoe. You can't do everything, remember?

I'll close by hoping the Year of the Tiger brings you many wonderful, stripey, gorgeous things, and quoting a snippet from Burkeman:

"Any finite life -- even the best one you could possibly imagine -- is ... a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility… Living a truly authentic life -- becoming fully human -- means facing up to that fact... It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life...

"Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been."

I worry that a lot of my life will have been cheese, or noodles, or chocolate, but hey...