Happy New Year

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Of course it was all perfectly lovely, in the end. There was chatting, laughing, fine wines, good food, stories of the old days, and singing. (Moral of the story: if you are brought up by a father who sang you Irish rebel songs from the cradle, you never quite throw that off.) I go into the new year with the ambition to write many books, which is vague but good.

The camera battery died, and I only had time once it had charged up to take one rather blurry picture of the hill. This feels like a good metaphor in my drive against the perfection genies.

As there were no photographs today, I thought perhaps it would be a nice excuse to offer you a canine greatest hits, from 2010:

 

Good to know that I may start 2011 on a note of slight self-indulgence. Although I have decided that it could be seen as a blast of hope: if such beauty exists in the world, then 2011 cannot be all bad. Or, on a more realistic note: I am very lucky to have such exceptionally charming dogs, and even luckier that the dear readers do not seem to mind that I put up endless pictures of them here. What else is a blog for?

May I thank you all for your wonderfully generous support in the last year. Blogging still feels very new and curious to me, and, as you may have noticed, most days I have hardly any idea what I am doing. It is a fascinating and novel medium, and I think that if I concentrate hard enough I shall eventually get to the bottom of it. It is an interesting thing to do in itself, and I find myself enjoying it much more than I ever dreamt, but what really makes it worth it is the goodness and kindness of the readers. I cannot say this enough. So: thank you. And I hope that you all have a very, very happy new year.