Rowan Tree and Red Thread

Thanks to all who remembered my birthday today. (Shared with braisedbywolves, pnh and Isaac Asimov. Happy birthday guys!) My birthday celebrations were low-key as usual, but pleasant and satisfying, also as usual. My mother, sainted and rail-mobile, made the train journey down to Cork yesterday to take us out to dinner last night and then made chocolate brownies with my daughter Rowan in the morning. By my best estimate, she's made brownies for every birthday of mine since about 1974. When I grow up I want to be a mother like her. Friends came round this afternoon and we consumed the brownies along with acres of other naughty food. January doesn't really start until tomorrow.

Christmas was fun and spread over a sinfully extended period, being as it was celebrated first with my mother in Dublin and then again with my wife's parents in West Cork. Rowan benefited from the time-honoured right of an only granddaughter to monopolise the attention and affection of all three grandparents and barely avoided being lost beneath a heaping pile of presents. I didn't do badly myself, and have yet more books to find homes for in our shrinking living space. I also received Imogen Heap and Kate Bush's new CDs and have been looking for excuses to go out driving to listen to them. I don't listen to much music at home while Rowan is awake; my attention is usually needed elsewhere. Never mind, both will be ripped onto my MP3 player for the walk to and from work.

Christmas holidays are usually a time for me to stick my nose in a book or two, and I was pleased to read three books in four days as the year closed. I thought I'd lost the ability, but this bodes well for retirement, only another 28 years away.

And guess what? I lost a couple of pounds over Christmas. I must go and be checked for a tapeworm. It's the only explanation.