Thursday, January 01, 2009

Urbi et Orbi

Do I have a new years message for the world as one year slips by into the next?

No not really, I have not the energy for it.

I leave the old year somewhat embittered by my experiences of it, what could have been a year of hope, but seeing what has happened to the economy, never mind the prospects for world peace, seems like one I will not wish to repeat.

I have had all the fight and the stuffing knocked out of me, all I can do is rant on like an ageing King Lear.

I have survived Christmas, but am not yet ready to fully engage with the new year and take up my usual responsibilities, both to myself and others. I am continuing to take a break.

My visit to South Wales was good fun, but the weather has not really been too good for seeing much else in the world.

I have my insurance cheque at least and need to use the car one last time to carry some goodies home from the new branch of IKEA, which has settled in the centre of Coventry as one 140 foot tall blot on the landscape, where once was a co-operative store where I used to shop when I lived oppositte to it in a housing co-operative. The words co-op mean nothing nowadays, but co-operatives were once seen, like credit unions as useful social institutions for the working classes to better themselves and gain some toe hold on economic equality. I still have my one pound share in the local Co-op, whose cider I must say is of excellent quality but that is a diversion (albeit a pleasant one)

Perhaps all that is left to me now is to subside into a life of drinking as much as I can whilst I can still afford it, and shaking off the demands of life, I don't know because I am not yet ready to assume them again.

So much to do and so little time to do it as ever, and what time there is, is wasted as it is pointless doing anything when your heart is not in it.

Well my heart is still into photography so here are my recent pictures, the weather has not been kind and one makes the best one can.

http://www.larry-arnold.info/photography/Scenery/endofyear.htm


The picture accompanying this blog is local, from the Warwickshire/Oxfordshire border near Edge Hill showing the heavy frost and dullness that is the weather currently.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really like that picture. I like the pictures of the countryside and especially the rocks. I really like the rocks in the UK, I know that may seem weird (to like the look of rocks) but they remind me of the glacial rocks, moss and lichen covered, from my youth in Appalachia.

CS

Larry Arnold PhD FRSA said...

Well both the Brecon Beacons, and Snowdonia are glacial landscapes, formed during the last Ice Age.

I like the desolation and the sparseness, it was a landscape that appealed to the early Welsh saints, who took to it as did the Desert Fathers to the equally inhospitible but somewhat hotter lands in Egypt.

Socrates said...

Mega Pics L.

kristina said...

more photos, thank you for sharing them---I've always wanted to go to Wales. someday....