Fidelma Cook: Happy New Year

Most of my neighbours still rise with the sun and if no longer retired at the going down of it, they are fast asleep long before 11pm.

I'm told they still find the sight of my shutters unlocked mid-morning rather astonishing as they've been long at work, newly baked morning baguettes bought soon after dawn.

But as I'm known as 'the journalist' they excuse what actually is just plain laziness, as being my artistic temperament that has me toiling through the night, crafting my words.

I've never disabused them of their belief in my tormented world of the intellect.

Never told them I'm simply buggering about on the Mac to the extent of now having a trapped nerve; or watching some late night chat show just to feel a moral superiority over some vapid pop star.

Conversely, they cannot understand why, on the one winter's night when simply everyone is out frolicking, no hint of light comes from Las Molieres.

Hogmanay is known as la Saint-Sylvestre and although it passed three days ago, my neighbours continue to celebrate this time and will until the end of the month.

They arrive with Bonne Annee cards, a box of truffles, a potted plant for the killing, perhaps even a jar of foie-gras.

Christmas was spent within, considered only for children, but New Year is for friends.

On Saint-Sylvestre itself many packed the Lavit Salle de Fetes, paying €65 for a feast matched by champagne, wines and Armagnac.

Under the usual French glare of blazing lights it went on until the early hours. Many, I'm told, continued carousing at different houses.

I slumbered on, strangely unwilling to think too much of the year ahead.

I suppose that when I was younger (like all of us) I automatically approached the beginning of each crisp, shiny New Year with expectation, desire, anticipation, and, above all, hope.

Such possibilities ahead, such barely imagined potential changes and magnificent opportunities.

Chomping at the bit to get to them, willing those yet unwritten days away.

Anything, everything was there for the taking - laid out before me, us, on a shining, untrodden path that always led upwards, never straight.

Superstitious Celt that I was/am I would never tempt the gods though, always adding the rider 'God willing' 'Please God,' when discussing or even thinking to myself of the future.

There were the first black inked entries in the freshly opened desk diary, made in an Italic script the nuns would weep for joy to see; the new notebooks stacked in perfect alignment by first, the typewriter, then the keyboard.

And the daydreams being polished into reality: The next newspaper, the flat move, and the million unexpected thrills that could and surely must be awaiting me.

Beyond the avoidance of bringing myself to the gods' attention and irritating my own, I never considered the googlies that could be bowled my way.

Accidents, sickness, others, or mine barely figured in my consciousness and how could they?

My body did my bidding with an innate grace and lightness; my brain amassed and kept knowledge to be flung out to amuse or antagonise; my face bore no cracks or crevices of time.

Life, glorious, glorious life, stretched on and on and on.

And then one day, followed by others, it falters as others falter around you, or those expectations suddenly sour in a quite unforeseen way.

The drip feed of time starts whispering: You are mortal. Fear, not excitement causes the heart to flutter at the sight of the unmarked months in the now electronic diary.

And peering back at the year now gone it is all too easy to see the bad blocks of time, the many little sadnesses and disappointments - the grief.

The moments of pure happiness, even joy; the feel of hot sun on face; the unfurling of leaf and flower from twig, all lost under the weight of the darker times.

Just after the mid-point of the year, I vowed in these pages to accept my life more easily, to embrace positivity and banish the negatives.

In other words to be grateful and thankful for the here and now and to stop the ceaseless self-examination. To look outwards without question.

In many ways it has worked. I no longer see LM as my prison but rather my home and one I chose. The reasons why are no longer relevant. It's how it is and others who mock my burial in the backwoods cannot be allowed any longer to destabalise me.

It is in this mood I face the coming year. There are no guarantees of time for any of us as the tragedy in Glasgow so cruelly showed.

And being fretful and fearful simply spoils the time we have.

You know what I'm about to say with all this verbosity and justification, don't you?

Yep, an Afghan hound pup will arrive in a fortnight. Mad, bad and dangerous to know.

But all will be well...God willing.