Now the hard to see guy standing between the front legs of the giant reindeer is me. The silly season is just about upon us and now I am counting down the last days of this blog. How strange it all seems because even in this relatively quiet year I have been reflecting on how much my life thus far has stretched well beyond any dreams I had for it - well maybe I dreamed but I could never have expected it to have panned out quite the way it has. So the plans for the next half (oh yes, it may not be exactly half in years but it swill be in experience) are already taking shape and I am excited about them. New songs (have already started recording the Attic Tapes), new books (I am 40,000 words in) and I already have an invite to spend a week in Montana in April, how cool is that (actually it will be cool). But this morning I am in the kitchen with the early grey tea and its still pitch black, coal dark outside, Sunday started early (for a Sunday) and I have a study to tidy, I reckon there are around a hundred books stacked on the floor against the fireplace - where do they all come from because I am running out of places to build shelves (a very cathartic exercise, if I say so myself) and then what do I do with the five or six pictures awaiting framing and hanging, and then there's the limited edition Hockney prints, oh and then there's a 'box full of water' poems that cascade down from the shelf onto the desk, there must be a way of displaying them better. Sigh, I won't get the new shelves built today, nor will I get the pictures framed but I will have an idea which I want to keep here and which I can take to Winchester - ah, its what Sundays are made for. I have a very nostalgic attachment to this Tom Waits song, let me hang it on your screen, just for a breath:
