Hm. That’s a good selfie for 2025. It’s been a strange year. There were certainly some wonderful times. I had a number of times up in the Alps with and without family and friends. I got to a conference in Kraków by train (that was an adventure!) and overlapped there with Blerta and Clara, two of the very special people I have been lucky enough to work with and get to know not just as colleagues but also as a real friends. I have seen great art and countrysides in various places and expanded the range of music I enjoy.
However, it’s also been a tough year and my last post caught some of the worst of that. I and all in my near family still absorbing the death of my mother and almost immediately our young relative (who I think deserves this anonymity here) being diagnosed with diabetes while still not two years old. The last whammy of 2025 for me was being hit with a bunch of new and exacerbating health challenges. None of them should be cutting my life expectancy but each is a bit of a facer and going to need investigations and managing. I am starting 2026 trying to pay better attention to my life style and fitness: I guess at 68 I’ve been lucky to get this far without more health challenges than I have had but it’s been a bit of a shock.
Forcing myself to write this I was shocked to discover that it’s my 150th blog post in this site. I had thought I might be up to something like a third of that! I check my three sites, and Jo-anne’s, every morning to check they are up and working and recently this site had been depressing me as it seemed so obviously a project that I started as I gave up my clinical post in summer 2016 and cycled to Santiago de Compostela. It seemed rather a mess of good intentions but poor sustained input. The bits about that pilgrimage seemed never really nourished into either an entertaining account of that journey that, nor as a resource that might be useful to anyone else thinking of it cycling the camino. Likewise, clicking on a page every day to check that it opened, I’ve felt that the site never morphed onward into a coherent personal web site! Hm, perhaps 150 posts and quite a lot of images and bits and pieces isn’t so bad for all that it does want some serious organising.
Will I find time to do that? I guess this year with those reflections about morbidity and mortality has shaken my eternal optimism that I will find time to do far more of what I want to … far more than I ever do!
On that theme, that was a sketch that my late mother sent me, probably about thirty years ago. She had done French and German at school and then on the way to top honours in her degree but I had three attempts at learning German and failed! (I plead that the first two were with the same truly awful teacher at school!) Anway, she translated it for me which I remember as “Go no faster than your guardian angel can fly!” Sound advice though I don’t know that I took it!
I have no idea where she found the image but I know it wasn’t hers: she always said that she was a copyist not an artist. I found it at some point in these last few hard months and I’ve put it up on that cork board in my room in London and I’m starting to build a general memento collection around it. Perhaps that might help organise this site as I spread around the cork board.
One thing is clear: I have always thought I could do more in any space of time than I ever actually achieve. I think that’s a sort of trying to go faster than my real, and now ageing body and brain, can go! The challenge of rethinking what I do with my time does now have to be faced a bit more thoughtfully.
On that note, two last images from 2025. The first are orchids from Llantwit Major: a lovely blast of colour and beauty there in the bungalow that was first my maternal grandparents’ home when they retired from Cardiff to Llantwit and which is now my father’s home. The second are roses in South London discarded as their Christmas glory started to fade but rather lovely with the rain drops on them this morning. As ever, they should open up full size if you click on the images.
Enough for now. Onwards!