New Year

After the party. The new year. The year started in style with snow here in Amsterdam. We went for a real winter walk yesterday, cold, white and wet. The other park this time, it looked lovely.

We had some friends over for New Years’ Eve, a couple from the north and a couple from the south. One little boy included. We’ve all known each other for years, but we only meet up once in a while because we live so far apart. We are all such different people, but at the same time when we get together there is always so much to talk about, to catch up on, and enough common interest. It makes for a relaxing time. At midnight we opened our bottle of champagne. Then we went up on the roof to watch the fireworks. The lovely thing about Amsterdam is that there aren’t all that many very tall buildings. So even from our building you can see quite far in alle directions, and we could see fireworks all around. We could definitely hear them down in the street. The neighbours joined us up on the roof and they brought some of their own fireworks. It was pretty cold, but not too bad.

It is always interesting to have people in the house, especially like this, for more than a few hours. I live in a rather simple place, an appartment, four rooms, no great luxury. Two of the rooms have a gasheater, no double-glazing, so the house tends to be relatively cold. I am used to it, and often I don’t have the heating on, I just put on an extra jumper and a thick pair of socks. If you are used to a new house with central heating this can be a problem. One of our guests kept her coat on for a while and only took that off after we had had the heating on for a couple of hours. She then borrowed a thick jumper of one of the other guests and wouldn’t let that go. Meanwhile, to me the room felt incredibly hot.

Then last night a short visit to our old lady friend in the nursing home. She played Bingo in the home on New Years’ Eve and had won some chocolate and a bar of soap. Then she also had a little party with the people on her own floor. Last year she was still in hospital and spent the evening in her bed, listening to her little radio around midnight. Good to see her back like this again. She did spend most of yesterday sleeping to recover. She’ll be 90 this year.Walking there and back was nice, because by now the snow had stopped, but the pavements, trees and bikes were all covered in a beautiful white layer of snow.

This is almost the end of my end of year holiday. It feels like I’ve been home for weeks, and it has been over two weeks. Work seems so far away, and I really need to dig deep again to find the things I’m supposed to do next week. I’m sure I’ll get there. It’s been good staying at home for a bit though, and doing all of those things I never get round to. The house is clean again, I’m still busy sorting out stuff, I’ve finally started on the books. And I’ve been writing and reading a lot.

I decided a little while ago to get rid of a lot of things, to make room in the house, and I started that a few weeks ago. The first loads have already gone, but I guess they were the easy ones, the ones you think of the moment you make the decision. Now that I’ve started on the books it is more difficult. Which ones do you really want to keep? Which ones are you going to read again? I find that some books have been in my bookcase for over twenty years, I’ve never
thought much about them, and then you decide you want to read them again for some reason. Then there are the books I want to read again before I give them away, but there are so many. Do I really want to spend time reading them? These are the books I probably wouldn’t have read again anyway, and I’d rather just read want I really want to read. And most of the books I am getting rid of I can find at the library anyway, so if I do want to read them again at some point, I can.

Maybe my resolution for this year should be not to buy any new books, but to read all the things in my bookcase I haven’t read yet. And to visit the library more. I could finally finish “The Lord of the Rings” maybe…. Meanwhile, I have started reading a Beryl Bainbridge book. She is a wonderful author to come back to once in a while. This one is about the voyage of the Titanic, so I guess I know the end, but that doesn’t really matter.