December I would chalk up as another Good Month.

We successfully made it through the gazillion domestic jobs that needed our attention before we left home, and we successfully made it to Japan. Here in Fukuoka, we celebrated a very pleasant Christmas, and we've been enjoying exploring the island of Kyushu on foot and by rail (start here and work forward).




I wrote a year-end retrospective a couple of weeks ago, so I won't repeat that. But on what is the last day of the year as well as the last day of the month, I guess you can't help doing a bit of accounting.

It's definitely been a much more interesting year than last year (even though some of the "interesting" was not what we would have chosen). The ability to travel more (both at home and abroad) has translated into 169 PT posts. That's a distinct improvement on last year's paltry 107, and is almost back up to the 2020 level, which wasn't hugely far off the (so far unbeaten) posting record set in 2019. And in terms of photos, we end the year with more than 4,000 (as compared with last year's measly 1,500).

The Velvet Cushion has also thrived this year, sprouting a record-breaking 82 posts. December's nine entries were all on novels. There were four mysteries of various types and eras, all by women: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand; The Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton; More Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham; and The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers. But also, in more serious vein, we had Kokoro by Natsume Soseki; In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut; and Shanghai by Riichi Yokomitsu; plus a couple more entries on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels: the TV version of My Brilliant Friend; and The Story of a New Name.




The last day of the month and year is also an invitation to introspection, I find. There were many times this year when I would not have dared predict how it would end. That's always true, I know, but we had very specific reasons for uncertainty in 2022. I'm massively grateful for the happy finale. But I wish I'd performed better on the way through...

Today I read an essay by Galen Strawman, which pushes back against the idea that we all construct and live a "narrative". Strawman thinks it is both false that all humans "story themselves", and false that to do so is always a good thing. That's kind of comforting. Like Strawman, "I for one have no clear sense of who or what I am." And if there had been a "story" this year, my part in it would have been the flaky, cowardly anti-hero, looking for answers in all the wrong places.

Strawman goes on, though, to quote from Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations (1876):

"Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has drawn out your soul, what has commanded it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by what they are and by their sequence, they will yield you a law, the fundamental law of your true self."

That's not a bad little exercise to carry out at the end of the year... First in my line-up would be the people I love; next, I'm sure, would be books and ideas; and then probably writing... But nature is really high up there too. And the surprises and (controlled) insecurity of travel. And food (but maybe that would be too prosaic for Nietzsche...)



The final day of the year has also been inspired by Maria Popova's "best of the year" list. There were many reminders here of things I'd appreciated on the way through, and things I'd like to return to in more depth in the future. But I'll just single out one text, entitled Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The genesis of this extraordinarily inspiring piece of music (still wonderful, despite looped renditions in our local supermarket) has the aptest of messages for this year, which has seen so much global destruction:

"[As the composer] faced the audience [after the first performance in 1824], the entire human mass erupted with not one, not two, not three, but four volcanic bursts of applause, until the Police Commissioner managed to yell 'Silence!' over the fifth. These were still revolutionary times, after all, and art that roused so fierce a response in the human soul -- even if that response was exultant joy -- was dangerous art. Here, in the unassailable message of Ode to Joy, was a clarion call to humanity to discard all the false gods that had fueled a century of unremitting wars and millennia of inequality -- the divisions of nation and rank, the oppressions of dogma and tradition -- and band together in universal sympathy and solidarity."

Now, the IR bit of me harrumphs, and wants to insist that the divisions need to be eased and negotiated away, not wished away. Nevertheless, Ode to Joy is a stirring reminder of what we should be aiming for.



Popova recalls singing Ode to Joy with her school choir shortly after her birth country, Bulgaria, emerged from dictatorship. But Bulgarian has no direct equivalent for "joy", she says. It was only as an adult that she realized that the truest interpretation of the word is the "ecstatic fusion of presence and possibility".

Let's hope 2023 brings joy. Despite the mounting idiocies in the world. Despite the humongous covid nest that has now emerged in the north of our continent. Despite the scars of the last few years.



Joy needs to surprise us, I think. It can't be manufactured. But I guess Nietzsche's question -- "what has drawn out your soul, what has commanded it and at the same time made it happy?" -- helps us clear the decks, and prepare the way, making its visitation more likely. May it be...

So, that's a wrap. Later, we'll head out to see what the New Year's Eve streets of Japan look like. But recording that can wait until tomorrow.