Happy New Year

Because of the kind anxiety displayed by various warm-climate commenters about my soapy green mangoes (which our son ate) I bought a pinker one today to reassure you. The boy’s sadly gone now but I’ll add it to tomorrow’s fruit salad for a little taste of sudsy goodness.

Things are very quiet here at the moment. Daughter 1 and her husband are in England with his family; Daughter 2 is in London with her actor boyfriend and other friends; and Son has returned to Dumfries, two hours away. Mr Life is at work and my brother is doing some d-i-y jobs for my mother; he recently popped in to borrow some tools. There will be only eight of us for New Year dinner: Mr Life, my mother and aunt, my brother, his wife and daughter (their son has returned down south), my niece’s friend who’s doing a PhD in Edinburgh, and me.

As I've confessed before, I’m not at all good at the let-them-fly aspect of parenting. I mean, I’m fine with my darlings going off to visit people, but I do like them to come back. And yet, contradictorily, I like being by myself too; pottering about; doing bits of writing and reading and walking. But I find it very difficult transforming myself within a relatively few years from a very hands-on attentive mum to a … person. And it doesn’t help that I’m really getting quite an old person with baggy bits and wrinkles. Which are only going to get worse.

Still, we do have cats who demand attention, a bit like babies. I’m currently sitting in the cold study while there’s a nice radiator on in the living room, where the cats are sleeping happily, full of Tesco Finest prawns. They usually get Tesco Value prawns, but these were sold out this morning.

Well well, enough of this random wittering.

2009 may turn out to be a funny old year, what with the credit crunch and all that – I had my friend Maggie to coffee yesterday and she was saying that both her sons had lost their jobs – one a stockbroker and the other a salesman. But I hope all my bloggy friends manage to avoid too much crunchiness and I wish you health and happiness in the coming year.