Booked

When I first started work we got Christmas Day and Boxing Day off and the lucky would also get Christmas Eve, or at least half of it. Almost all of us were back in work on 27th December to pick up on what had been abandoned the previous week. New Year's Day, introduced as a holiday in 1974, was a bit of a novelty, and it was quite good to have one more day's respite after four days back at work.

Now the whole period has become a two-week slump at a time of year that isn't great for going away. I really don't like it but, paradoxically for someone like me who is not interested in resolutions, it has become a time where behaviour patterns get changed, like it or not. 

This year I have been reading and remembering how much I used to love getting lost in books. When I was ten or so I had a notebook where I'd list each book I'd read in blue Quink. I would often finish five a week. I used to walk to secondary school glued to a book (sometimes in bare feet, it being the late 60s, and I have scars on my feet to show for that combination). I would read on buses, in trains, in lunch breaks, under the desk or the dining table, in bookshops and in any spare moment I could find. 

All sorts of things changed that: more demanding work, cycling, parenthood and, more recently, taking a camera rather than a book out with me, then getting drawn into blip.

My beginnings of decluttering in December sent a lot of books I won't read (again or at all) to the Oxfam shop. On my second visit I browsed the shelves to see how many of my first batch had been accepted and was pleased to see several of them there. I also spotted three books on my would-like-to-read list and bought them. So far I have finished these two and I realise that a non-resolution for 2019 has formed itself: I will read more over the coming months and spend less time on blip.

I'll continue to upload pictures when I have them and (I've said this before, to little avail) will comment when I have something to say. So please forgive me when I sneak back to my book rather than commenting or responding.