The reader

Another day of wandering the streets of Seville. Infinite variety - even the same places, but come at from different angles. It was very relaxed today. Aside from the blip, I've put one final extra up - an example of some of the quite OOT architecture you find in Seville.

Apart from wandering, I've done reading and reflecting today. I'm slowly working my way through The Siege, recommended reading for visiting Cadiz. As I'm reading it on kindle, I have only the most vestigial grasp as to how big a book it is, but it certainly seems big, and I still have 12 hours to go according to the device.

The reflecting has focused on the decade, naturally, and on its highlights and lowlights. The lowlights included 23 June 2016 and 12 December 2019. The highlights mainly involved travel, both of the shorter term variety, such as visiting south east Asia and - much earlier in the decade - south east Europe, and of the longer term variety, such as our ten months in Finland. We've been lucky in this decade to have more options than in previous years and while our carbon footprint is probably worrying large, I've certainly had an amazing time (often with Mr A, and sometimes on my own) on #jostravels. Other highlights included my two knee operations - unpleasant in themselves, but leading to life improvements - and re-finding exercise and the gym, most recently Projekt 42. Professionally, it's also been a decade of change. I started the decade with no sense that retirement was anywhere near - not even on a distant horizon. At the end of the decade, with both my siblings retired, it's much, much closer. But meanwhile, I've reshaped my work again (for the umpteenth time), so I generally feel that what I'm doing at the moment more closely matches 'the real me' than what I was doing at the start of the decade. The next decade is going to get off to a great start with the publication of a book at the beginning of June, and I hope to get several other books 'off my chest' during the decade.

So goodbye to the 2010s. Not a vintage decade, but for me personally one I feel I've lived as well as I could, and one in which I've had more personal contentment than many previous decades. And one that is more or less completely recorded on blip, which really is quite something.

Happy new year to all!