Merry Christmas, everyone!...

Another busy year draws to a close.  I’m unlikely to have access to the internet again before January (& if anyone is thinking “poor you”, don’t! – I could do with some peace and quiet and one less technological temptation is no bad thing).  So as far as blogging is concerned, this is the last post of 2011.  And an odd old year it’s been, too.

Work has been busy and rather over-pressured a lot of the time.  On the creative front it’s been rather an uneventful year, with several things ticking over and progressing quietly, but nothing spectacular happening.  The garden has been a blessing as usual, and is beginning to look more like a proper garden as the shrubs I planted in 2009 settle in and put on growth.  My vegetable growing was a bit of a mess this year; slug-shredded chard, blighted tomatoes, beetroots that never germinated, but  climbing French beans that cropped extremely heavily, although in bursts rather than evenly, and rampaged everywhere, trying to escape over the fence and feed next door as well...

And now it is almost Christmas.  Ten days off.  In the Gardens, Father Christmas is seeing his last families today, and the carousel is playing a tootling pipe-organ cover of Slade's "So here it is, Merry Christmas" (one year we had one that played Sousa marches, which I liked but everyone else thought was very peculiar).  The first snowdrops are out in the Rock Garden, and Juno irises are flowering in the Alpine House, and a fine winter drizzle is falling everywhere in the misty dusk.

Tomorrow my elder brother is giving me a lift down to Kent.  Tonight I will have to have a takeaway for supper, because I have wound-down my supply of perishables so successfully that it’s that or a tin of baked beans (& much though I baked beans, they aren’t very celebratory).  Tomorrow we slip off to the countryside. 

So Merry Christmas to one and all, and may the new year bring you prosperity and happiness, success and good health!