That was the year, that was

If you read my response to the last Friday Five, you may have guessed that, for all its celebrations, 2007 has not been a year of unremitting joy in Privet Drive.
Last New Year's Eve, though I made no public pronouncements, I did make myself a promise as the evening wore on that in the year ahead I would take active steps to sort out those parts of my life I was least happy with.
At the end of the year, despite alot of very hard work from more than one quarter, actually nothing much has changed.
I'm not even sure if it can - and that's not a good thing to realise,- though as I type this I hear my Great Aunt May's voice "What can't be cured must be endured" - so perhaps this year's goal had better be an end to even my quiet internal whingeing.
Certainly the blog isn't the place for any necessary processing - so instead, I too will join the ranks of those reviewing the year via the first sentence of each month's posts. I hope this year's may be a little more exciting than its predecessor

Every now and then,I am filled with an unwarranted sense of my own importance as a communicator (this may be an occupational hazard for preachers) and specifically as a writer, and delude myself into believing that this blog has merit beyond the very limited reality.
As anyone reading this surely knows , I'm chaotic by nature and find it really hard to use time well and wisely, so I was probably hoping for magic answers, but was not unduly surprised to find them eluding me.
Llan was great: I'd not been there in stormy weather before, and in its position on the side of the hill the house felt very much like a ship breasting the waves, as the wind howled around us.
OpenHouse, our once a month informal family worship, is now 18 months old.
Apologies for the break in transmission, which crept up on me rather.
I’m getting slightly confused here.
If you're feeling weary, I suggest you just move straight on. I'm not quite sure why I'm blogging this - it's not, I promise, in an effort to claim the "most clapped-out clergy award" for 2007.
Hattie Gandhi remains the perfect person with whom to travel and our hosts at Tregithy were their usual hospitable selves.
I really don’t want to bore you…but I do need to note some other highlights of Greenbelt worship this year, if only so I've a reference point when I need it.
One of the great compensations for losing both my parents when I was just 18 (honestly, - there were some, I’m not just putting a brave face on things) was the number of friends who included me as extra members of their family, whose mums encouraged me to turn up for meals, to stay the night, or just hang around the place whenever I felt like it.
I must be dotty:with everything else that is currently going on in my life, I've signed up for a whole month of blogging every day.
World AIDS Day and I'm thinking about my friends in Tamil Nadu who are part of the AIDS Awareness and Rehabilitation project that opened while we were out there a year ago.

So - themes of blogging, of characteristic confusion, of worship and time out, and of some of the special people whom God has put in my way. Pretty representative of my life, I guess.
Time now to walk dogs and then make salads....New Year's Eve, with all its weight of expectations and scope for disappointment, stretches ahead.
However you're spending it, I hope it's kind to you