THE DAYS BETWEEN...

......the celebration of Santa`s birthday and the crash, bang wallop of another new year are a bit of a dead end really but at least they give the opportunity for a little light reflection on the year just on the way out.  I`ll resist the self indulgence of picking out highlights of my year, perhaps because they were a little thin on the ground during this Covid stuff;  but I will mention my granddaughter`s wedding which finally happened in October after a couple of Covid related postponements.  A glorious family day, never to be forgotten.

Instead I have been looking through the posts I have concocted this past year - 165 of them - and I`ve tried to pick out a couple which I suggest might sum up my priorities and the way I see the world in what are now my evening years.   Now I suppose it might be true that the older one gets, the more one looks back on childhood and those places that made those formative years so very special.  So I`ve selected a post I wrote back in May after we had had another memorable week in the New Forest. 

I`m not quite a child of the New Forest but pretty close by, having spent the years during and immediately after World War 2 on the Waterside - that area between the shoreline of Southampton Water and the New Forest - it holds special memories for me and whenever we return there it feels more and more like going home.  Anyway, here`s what I wrote in May which I hope captured my affection for the area, its peace and quiet and its escape from the rest of life`s troubles and misadventures:-

https://snoppersays.blogspot.com/2021/05/quiet-places.html 

(To see the post, please highlight the above link, right click and there`s an option to `go to.....`)

And the other post I have chosen is a deliberate attempt to get away from these dismal, dog end days of late December and remind myself of those times spent in the summer sun watching the cricket down at Canterbury.  At least we have now turned the corner of the winter solstice and - like Southampton finally looking up the Premier League table rather than down - I am already looking forward to the return of the sun and those lazy, hazy days when the world will surely seem much brighter than it does today:-

https://snoppersays.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-day-of-contrasts-yesterday-and-calm.html

Perhaps these two random samples out of the 165 might tell you more about me than anything else.