New Year 2012

With Bellowhead uncharacteristicaly not at the Royal Festival Hall we thought we would spend our New Year in Oxfordshire, celbrating with our usual shuffle out onto the grass with the neighbours for sparkly wine and rockets at midnight. These carefully laid plans were however shattered when Jam got invited to his friend Sam's party in Newbury (Sam & Jam went travelling together after college to worldly places lik Japan, this however is Sam in his natural habitat).

We arranged a chicken sitter and soon were having sock off's with the best of them.

 

(that's me on the right in the stars), as well as inpromptu sock showings we played trivial persuit (and lost) and ate and drank many nice things as well as me getting the chance to get to know some of Jam's friends a bit better. (This is Sam & his girlfriend Beccy counting down the moments)

After all that fun there was nothing for it but to go home and sleep for quite a long time. Happy New Year to all the readers of this little corner of the internet, I hope this year makes all your dreams come true. 

This year in pictures

So things I was aiming to do this year were roughly as follows:
1. Go on a date with a least one nice chap (having had my heart broken yet again late last year this was definitely top of my list to regain faith in men-kind). January came and I met this chap:

This quickly followed:

:-)

2. Having spent last year playing with the frankly Awesome Stanger Things Happen at Sea (and then disbanding the band due to the sheer distances between its members)

 the search was on for a new band. This started off with a chance encounter with Sreeves (and a good deal of discussion over pints about the kind of thing we wanted to do) followed by our debute gig in April.

After the gig we decided a larger sound was called for, I'd invited my friend Emily (who I'd met through voluntering) to our 1st annual carol jaunt, we'd kept in touch and as soon as I heard she also played the cello Chris & I invited her and former Stranger member Kevin to become our fellow minstrels. The quartet was complete and we've now played a couple of gigs together with more I hope to follow in the New Year!

Some of my intentions weren't as sucessful: update and redesign the blog being only partly achieved (my friend Lea very kindly did some editing on my current template but I think a blog redesign may be called for in the new year). Also there are quite a few blog posts still missing as my hard drive died a coupe of months ago leaving me with many posts sans pictures. All this should be fixed come the new year so I guess I'm carrying this one over.

4. To start doing more of the things I love. This one was definitely achieved, 2011 if nothing else was the year that this was created:

 I also taught violin/viola at a kids ceilidh workshop at Towersey again, stage managed the Bulverton Marquee at Sidmouth (one of the largest stages I've ever worked on, there were a few hairy moments I can tell you), went on holiday to Turkey (first foreign holiday for quite a few years, while there I relaxed, read and appreciated the local wine), started attending woodschool/attempting the carving of many hours and kept in touch/spent more time in the same room as my friends.
5. Start writing more tunes/finish the novels: because of the band I've found it quite easy this year to write music, more difficult was finding time to do the serious editing thats needed on both novels (part of the problem is I think that I'm not sure what I'd do with them if I did finish them, not sure I have the stomach for agents rejections...). So although this is being carried over I'm going to first set myself the mini goal of getting a poem or another piece of writing published (this excludes work where I edit a magazine and this blog). I'm hoping a the moment to publish with the wonderful Goblin Fruit but we shall see.

What about you guys any plans/goals for next year?