And there they were gone.
So that was the Noughties then! It hadn’t occurred to me that it was the end of an entire decade until a friend of mine texted me with “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Decade”. And that despite having watched The Gadget Show on Five do a review of the decade and try to pick the best gadget of it (my vote was for the iPhone).
Christmas was the usual affair for me - my parents and uncle came to stay, we had Christmas and then after Christmas headed north to in-law territory and did it all again. I always enjoy the run up to Scotland and this year I was particularly looking forward to it. Following my accident I have had to re-focus a few aspects of my life and my photography is one of those things which has come under the spotlight. Many other things I cannot do presently and most I will probably never be able to do again. Photography is one of those things I genuinely enjoy, even if I am nothing special at it, and in the latter half of 2009 I relied on it to help keep me sane whilst emerging from a very difficult period of my life. With my mother-in-law’s lovely cottage in Galloway sold this would be my final visit and I relished the chance to get out and get shooting. In the event the weather was not exactly amenable but I still managed to get out and press the trigger a few times.
Although we know friends who hail from the area, most of them school friends of my wife, they (like us) all now live in England and this year most of them did not return to spend Christmas with their families. We did, however, manage to catch up with Chris, who we have not seen for several years and finally got to meet his fiancée Katrin who was very nice. It has to be said, huddled up in the Harbour Lights Cafe in Kircudbright was probably the best place to be as the temperature outside never rose above freezing during our whole stay.
Driving down on New Year’s Eve and both feeling rubbish we somehow managed to find the energy to head out to a New Year’s party being thrown by friends John & Lucy, though with Susan needing to be up at 0530hrs to head to work we left pretty much straight after midnight. And that was it, goodbye to worst year of my life (displacing the previous record holder 1996 by some margin) and hello to a fresh new year and a whole new decade. My thoughts and wishes are with my friend Kirsty for whom 2009 was an order of magnitude worse than it was even for me.
At the beginning of 2009 I foolishly asked on this blog what the new year might have in store. Well I didn’t have wait long to find out. 2010? Well we’ve a boat to fix and at least one wedding to attend but other than that it’s one day at a time! Oh, and I need some filters for my camera.
Some of my pics from Christmas in Galloway are here.