Happy New Year

I think I ought to warn you in advance that this post may be a bit odd as I have had a glass of wine. As you may already know, I only rarely drink alcohol and consequently it doesn't take much of it to affect me quite profoundly.

Well, it's late evening on New Year's Day and we've spent a fair chunk of the day making a start on decorating our living room. I've taken some 'before' photos, so I'll post them up once we've got some 'after' photos to compare them with. We lifted up the corner of the carpet the other day and found out that the floor of the living room has the original hardwood floorboards (we think they're oak), so we'd planned on spending the day scraping the old, perished underlay off them before sanding them down. Unfortunately, when we took the whole of the carpet up we found large patched areas in pine and chipboard, so we've abandoned our plan to restore the original floor. As the floorbords are very uneven, we won't be able to lay wooden or laminate flooring on top, so we'll have to make do with carpet (not a popular option). Never mind, at least if we get a carpet, it'll mean less work for us, as we can get someone else to lay it! We've sanded down all the paintwork and now we're ready to make a start on the painting tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to painting the ceiling, as the room is 3.2 metres high.

Last night we went out to the local Irish bar, Rosie O'Grady's, to celebrate the New Year. Considering that we've only just moved here and so don't know anyone yet, we had a surprisingly good evening. We got talking to a local primary teacher whose friend was buying everyone drinks because he was part of a syndicate who owned a horse which had won a race at 29 to 1. We also spent quite a while chatting to a very nice couple from Durban in South Africa who emigrated to New Zealand a couple of months ago.

New Year's Eve is a bit surreal, isn't it? I've never felt entirely comfortable with the New Year's celebrations. The way humans chop up time into organised chunks, as if by doing this they could somehow control it, seems bizarre sometimes. This feeling is most intense at New Year. The counting down to midnight, which in reality is just another moment passing, seems arbitrary at best, but I suppose we need rituals like this in order to give life a semblance of the meaning and order that we crave.

Right, that's quite enough philosophising for one evening. I'm off to bed.