Not the Greek God …

I had to get up a little promptly on Friday morning so I set my alarm clock for 7.05am … just to make sure. I woke up and bleary eyed looked at the clock. It was exactly 7am.

Wow, I thought to myself, my biological clock is working rather well!

That’s when I heard it – the most awful, loud, clunking noise emanating from somewhere very close by! So that’s what woke me!

I staggered to the window and peered out - legs! Hairy legs at eye level!

It was one of those Am I dreaming? Is this real? kind of moments.

I just had to get a better look. So I pulled up the blind and risked another peep. Yes. I was right first time. It was a pair of legs - attached to a large cement truck.

Mystery solved! Our neighbours are building an extension to their house.

That’s all very well … but at 7 in the morning? Is that fair?

Misery guts …

Can you believe it? That’s what one of my friends and colleagues called me! Why? Because I don’t really enjoy Christmas!

Being in New Zealand and having a warm, bright, mostly sunny Christmas does help, though!

This year, and the first time ever for me, we had a REAL Christmas tree. It was organized by my son-in-law-to-be who is something of a Christmas child. I have to admit the tree looked very nice in a corner of our living space. The smell of pine was also rather pleasant.

I’m not sure what the tree would have thought about the whole thing. It looks rather ordinary now that it has joined others of its kind in our back yard. I rather imagine that it’s beginning to see itself as firewood.

Maybe it’s that time of the year – a new year, new beginnings but it brings to mind a verse from Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature which goes like this:

“HENCE when a Monarch or a mushroom dies,
Awhile extinct the organic matter lies;
But, as a few short hours or years revolve,
Alchemic powers the changing mass dissolve;
Born to new life unnumber’d insects pant,
New buds surround the microscopic plant;
Whose embryon senses, and unwearied frames,
Feel finer goads, and blush with purer flames;
Renascent joys from irritation spring,
Stretch the long root, or wave the aurelian wing.”