Dear 2013...

...I am glad to see the back of you.

Furthermore, 2013, please do not bother coming back, not even when I have dementia, and confuse 2023 with 1963. Please absent yourself. Recollection might tip me over the edge, send me dotty-do-lally, and have me wandering about Smalltown in my nightie wearing my second-best pair of antlers.

Why, you say? I speak, specifically, of My Little Year of Medical Miseries*, for which I am in remission, but which utterly ruined my otherwise happy days, as can be evidenced by the following low:

Me: I can eat white rice.
Dr: You can drink milk.
Me: White rice and milk?
Dr: Sure! Your body can live on white rice and milk. For a long time!
(pause)
Dr: Why are you crying?

Apart from that. 2014 promises all good news! The griblets burst into the year via Alice in Wonderland courtesy of The Hat, who took them ice skating and dining in a post-show haze of general bliss.

The little grits might have imagined 2014 could promise for them what it seems for The Hat, to wit: international travel, party, party, party, concert, another party, and a turn about an ice rink.

I disabused them of that sharpish, by reminding them I am having a miserable time on their behalf trying to find an external exam centre for IGCSEs. Not a good start. The previous centre used by home educators is now declining us.

I know I am under stress with this one, because of the nightmares. Last Friday I sent the demons packing but woke myself by the soft incantation of my comfort word (which I know will be looked upon with kindness by those who have a similar fetish); stationery.

But I am forever annoyingly positive, or forever in search of that which lifts me up. So I zipped the clan over to Cambridge Early Music to enjoy the fantastic Les haulz et les bas with the utterly brilliant Ian Harrison, he who manages to turn the shawn into some new jazz instrument of the twenty-first century. Highly recommended if you are into folk music from 1456.

* No cure but sit it out and wait for it to go; chronic condition; the sort of thing I wish on my worst enemy, the man at number 82.