31-12-2021: Day 204
On the eve of the final day of 2021, I was sitting up in bed contemplating the year, book-ended by the Virus I was being furiously trolled by. I wondered how the winter blues seemed to be raging its furrowed path round the country, which has seemingly left the state of the nation flatter than a flat pancake, a flat tyre, or a flat line on a hospital heart monitor.
Struck down by Covid, lungs on fire, I was left to hack a course through the remainder of the year like a blind man at a spaghetti junction, as the Christmas tree sheds its needles, in tune with every contagious cough, in this the house of the rising temperature.
So, when my thirteen-year-old daughter woke up and announced her plans to get drunk on NYE, I resigned myself to a curious night of Covid, chesty coughing and cocktails. All under the party radar, as the world gripped tight, far from the maddening crowds gathering at the base of Nelson’s Column.
2-1-2022: Day 206
Knee deep in tinsel, baubles, and swept up piles of pine needles, it was the time of year to flat pack away Christmas and turn attention to the affairs of the New Year. I was putting out a silent prayer to the red glittery star on the treetop, hope hollering that this lingering Covid chest would vaporise into the thin gruel of the January air. And, as the monsoon rains lash down outside the window, I was thinking about the eye of the tiger in 2022.
I have a new book on the sideboard called ‘The Tiger’, a timely Xmas gift from my sister-in-law, given this year is the year of the ‘water tiger’. And as a true-blue Piscean, born under the Chinese horoscope of the tiger, it all seems a little prophetic. Either way, it’s a true story about a man-eating tiger stalking the Siberian forests, out for vengeance like a land mammal ‘Jaws’, and represents a little light guided reading in the New Year ahead.