And so the old year drags to a close. Outside it's drizzly and overcast and much cooler than recently. I have distinctly mixed feelings about NYE and have always done so. 

There are very few that are memorable. Possible the most interesting was NYE in Florence in 1979. It was bitterly cold and I have no idea why I was out and about in a foreign city at such a late hour, but as one of the cathedrals struck midnight, people broke into song, applause and cheering. A young man near me unwrapped a large panettoni (I had never seen one before) and offered it around. I don't remember any fireworks. Everyone soon drifted home.

Other than that and the odd obligatory immersion in pyrotechnics, I have little to write about. I have always felt that the chance to genuinely reflect upon oneself has been missing, a symptom of the race to the next big thing. Resolutions have become a kind of standing joke. I wish that it weren't so.

But Happy New Year nevertheless. May there be fewer wars, more talk of peace and a kindlier attitude towards one's neighbour.

Hardly a week goes past without someone, often reasonably prominent or respectable, being arrested or charged or indeed convicted of viewing or dealing in child abuse material. The stories are usually quite similar - men who began by casually consuming 'ordinary' pornography, who over time become more involved with harder porn and who finally end up at the child abuse sites or exchanges or whatever they are called.

While the jury on whether porn leads to addiction or not is out (findings are inconclusive) there is little doubt that there are compulsive disorders that arise from porn consumption and which are demonstrably harmful to both the user and his family. It should come as no surprise that the overthrow of all regulation that occurred with the advent of the internet should lead us down this path.

Freedom for anyone to view porn anytime, anywhere has nothing to do with real freedom at all. It is just license, all dressed up. 

With my wife and step-daughter overseas and Tom house-sitting for his mum, I have had lots of time alone. I've said before that solitude is something that you can choose, whilst loneliness is thrust upon you by circumstances. Truthfully I do occasionally feel lonely, used as I am to a house that is constantly occupied by others. Night is probably the most acute time for feeling so.

I have occupied some of my time by watching old space movies. Many were made in the 1950's and 1960's, these decades being the dawn of the space age. Pretty much all of them are B-grade with tight budgets and limited scope for special effects.

But all have a few things in common. Firstly, the science is way off beam, given even the knowledge of the time. Mars and Venus have breathable atmospheres. Travellers (I dare not call them astronauts) wear casual clothes and are usually of an age or disposition totally unsuited to space travel. Security and launch procedures are incredibly lax - a policeman checking a crew list in the dark and using a flashlight to ID the crew member, press conferences with only minutes to go before take-off, flights that should take months only taking a few days. In one hilarious case, the evasion of a meteor storm saw the rocket go into 'infinite acceleration.'

In many respects, the movies take all their cues from ordinary Hollywood films of the time, where the focus was on the characters (especially different character types) and the plot revolved around solving problems and conflicts. There is almost aways a 'love interest.' In this scenario, the space is merely a device which is neither fully explored nor seriously engaged with scientifically.

That is not to say I haven't enjoyed them, though the fast forward button is helpful when the plot becomes too stuck or the acting too wooden.

 I'd like to finish 2023 with a wrap-up of the the general trends of Grand Sumo for the year. Overall, it was an unusual year. The top-ranked ranked wrestler, Terunofuji who is the sole yokozuna, spent all but one and a bit tournaments injured. If he returns in January, it may be for the last time.

The absence of the top man meant that lower ranked rikishi had a chance to step up and win the Emperor's Cup, which they duly did. Kiribayama (now Kirishima) won two, Takakeisho also nabbed two, though inconsistency in other tourneys meant that his 'yokozuna run' came to nought. Hoshoryu won the other, aside from Terunofuji's lone victory in the the one tournament he was able to finish.

There are plenty of exciting and talented young men coming through the ranks and I think we may see another yokozuna by the end of 2024. 

The year also saw the retirement of a number of wrestlers, including the popular Georgian, Tochinoshin. Many retirees go on to other roles in the sport but it seems likely he will return To Georgia.

Roll on the Tokyo Basho.

Christmas approaches again with talk of war, actual war and rumours of war. When it comes to ending conflict, I think the best we can hope for is patched-up compromises which hold the peace together until trouble breaks out again.

Peace projects such as the League of Nations and the United Nations are all well and good and certainly to be applauded, but they remain flawed by their own inbuilt limitations and the machinations of Great Powers. Nobody is going to hand over executive military control to a world body or government, so the unpleasant realities of nation state power politics remain with us.

Ultimately this boils down to human nature, flawed, subject to whims and changes, selfish and fearful, yet still able to imagine a utopian future where peace and justice rule. An illusion it is and little more. We should all work towards greater justice and friendly relations between peoples, but there is a limit to what can be achieved in a fallen world. 

Ann and JJ leave for Thailand early in the morning. Tom is minding his mum's place while she is away, so for the first time in a long while, I will be home alone. While I cherish solitude, I am not very keen on being thrust into loneliness, especially at Christmas time. And yet I realise that I have often been at a loose end at this time of the year for one reason or another.

Some time ago, the Chinese Tang dynasty poet Li Po wrote,

'All the birds have flown up and gone;

A lonely cloud floats leisurely by,

We never tire of looking at each other -

Only the mountain and I'

I can't find the translator's name, and it's very unlikely that it would have rhymed in lines 2 and 4, but I appreciate the point of this short work. Everything has fled except that which is immovable. I think it will shortly be time for a bush walk.

Occasionally I have a dream that seems to linger for a large part of the day. If it is bizarre enough and close enough to sunrise, that period of final sleep, then it can hang like a haze, muddling my brain and leaving me puzzled.

While there are tools enough on how we might think about the meaning of dreams, or why they appear in the form that they do, there seems little we can do to chase away the fog that they can leave in their wake. I have a lot of dreams (though fewer recently) about teaching and classrooms, usually surrounding my being totally unprepared for the lesson.

This morning, apart from the mandatory school one, I had a dream in which I had to take over the controls of a bus. I think that probably sprung out of having actually caught a bus yesterday from Strathfield to Penrith. On that journey, the driver had repeated trouble changing gears after coming to a halt. Watching him struggle obviously stayed with me.

I was reading a book once by Carl Jung on dreams and their relationship to the conscious and unconscious mind. He can be a little obscure and the subject matter is hard to pin down objectively, but I might give it another read sometime.

But on the theme of dreams, this wonderful sonnet by Christina Rossetti. It's a different kind of dream to mine, but nonetheless...

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might
Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;
Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,
As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight.
In happy dreams I hold you full in night.
I blush again who waking look so wan;
Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone,
In happy dreams your smile makes day of night.
Thus only in a dream we are at one,
Thus only in a dream we give and take
The faith that maketh rich who take or give;
If thus to sleep is sweeter than to wake,
To die were surely sweeter than to live,
Though there be nothing new beneath the sun.

I often run into young women who, seeing me as a safe confessional space, tell me about the travails of finding a 'good man.' They have really tried hard, using dating apps, social gatherings and the workplace as their go-to dating-pool environment. Which is fair enough.

But often as not, and it's usually not, they run into difficulties at the get-go. The usual complaints are not hard to guess at. The men are interested in 'only one thing', they are disrespectful, have poor conversation skills or simply talk about themselves the whole night-through, and are quite open about using pornography, recreational drugs and the like. They stare at their phones for want of anything to say.

If this seems like an odd way to go about a first date then you would have a good point. It's very strange, so strange and so obviously counter-productive that something broader, perhaps more insidious is at work.

Enter modern popular culture, allied with social media and an unfettered internet. A diet of reality TV, conspiracy theories and a crumbling values system is producing the very harvest that was predicted by some social scientists and all religious commentators.

It is hard to put the genie back in the bottle, is it not? It is worth trying, though it will probably take a disaster of one sort of another for things to be righted, even a little. No-one wishes for that, though come it may.

 A couple of years ago I wrote a short poem called 'Birthday Song.' In essence, it was a celebration of life, best understood as what very easily might have been had things gone to plan.

'Before the Mini-Minor there was me, 
Small and struggling in a foreign place,

My ending almost came before you see,

A clinic, the appointed time, a space

To see me off to nothingness...'

In 1958, my mother was deeply unhappily married and pregnant with her second baby. Realising that this would chain her even more tightly to my father, she arranged for an appointment at an abortion clinic. In those days, abortion was illegal as were the clinics. On the day of the procedure she turned up as planned, sat waiting in a tiny vestibule for her turn, and decided that she couldn't go through with it. And so, here am I.

For years I have struggled with the knowledge that my own story brings to the abortion debate, which in Australia appears to be pretty much settled. Abortion is legal in every state now.

And for years I dutifully bought the line that it was entirely a woman's right to choose and that the tiny blur of foetal material that comprised early pregnancy was largely inconsequential. But part of me knew that this wasn't true. I had hard evidence in my own existence. 

Returning to the church has only strengthened this view. It remains a complicated, emotional and deeply troubling issue. I don't have clear-cut answers. One risks the ire of many in opposing abortion or characterising it as what it really is, murder.

Only if you have survived such a death sentence can you really know.

The Tree

A sky-blue stretch was once a tree,

Its absence now an infinity,

There's no relief from endless space,

An empty pane to see.

The birds that sat at dusk and dawn,

Now congregate upon the lawn,

They cannot reason for the lack,

Or where the timbers borne.

I close my eyes and once again,

Give substance to the ancient frame,

An anaesthetic, yes I know

For the spectre it became.

Robert Frost, one of the foremost American poets of the 20th Century, wrote much about the natural world, often as a way of exploring human psychology and aspects of the human condition. He was a farmer in the first decade of the last century, clearly something that was formative, though he went on to be a jack of all trades.

Frost is popular for many reasons - he eschews the obscurity and difficulty of modernism - so one can pick up a volume and read quite happily about snowy evenings in the woods, the end of the apple-picking season, mending farm walls, swinging from birch branches and so forth. But of course, there is inevitably a deeper meaning, or meanings, which make the lighter reading more satisfying.

I am thinking of Frost today because yesterday a huge tree down the road was chopped down and is in the process of being carted away. Yes, it was dying or most nearly dead but it was also a perch for countless birds. From a window in my back room, I watched them in the mornings as the sun rose and in the evenings when the branches and trunk lit up with the glow of fading sunlight. It had to come down sometime, I know. and Frost would doubtless have found a way of writing about it. That would have been a lovely epitaph.

In the next post, I'll compose a poem on the subject in a Frostian style, though likely, with a genuflection to Thomas Hardy.

When you are retired from full-time work, which I am, every day seems much the same as every other day. The once famous weekends, when the weekly routine was broken and a blessed period of 48 hours of doing whatever you wanted to began, no longer matter. To quote The Smiths, though with quite different intent, "every day is like Sunday."

Sure I have my volunteer work and church commitments which are very day and time specific, but other than that, I can float breezily though the days. Oh, and there is my recording schedule for 2RPH, which theoretically could consume a lot of time. Even so, I can still float.

Some will look at me and say, 'what a lucky chap!' But in truth, I enjoyed working (for the most part) and while the teaching profession has the capacity to both shock you and grind you down, I was very committed nevertheless. Possibly too much so, at times.

So the idea of retirement, a very recent concept incidentally, remains up there with the idea of marriage and the idea of having children or even the idea of happiness. It is partly an illusion, partly wishful thinking. And quite a lot of hoping.

Christina Rosetti is a Victorian poet whom I have written about before. She is regarded as one of the best poets of that period, deservedly in my opinion, though she will not be to everyone's tastes. In particular, her devotional poems, of which there are many, will be off-putting to some, such is the faithlessness of our age. There are many secular poems too, often as not exploring ideas around love, loss and longing.

I have been stuck on a poem in one of her collections called 'I Will Arise' which I seem unwilling to pass, at least not without some comment. The poet is 'weary and weak... downcast in (my) soul' having failed in her estimation to 'reach the goal.' This is a bit like a dark night of the soul, where spiritual dryness and a lack of a sense of God's 'consolation' can cause a lot of distress. It is nothing new, the Desert Fathers talked about it 1600 years ago and it is a theme of a lot of Christian writing through the ages.

What saves Rosetti from despair is her yet deeper understanding of God's love - real, abiding, unchanging and ever-present. In Verse 2, she says,

'One only thing I knew, Thy love of me;
  One only thing I know, Thy sacred same
Love of me full and free,
  A craving flame
Of selfless love of me which burns in Thee.
How can I think of thee, and yet grow chill;
  Of Thee, and yet grow cold and nigh to death?
Re-energize my will,
  Rebuild my faith;
  I will arise and run, Thou giving me breath.'

Aside from her working through a spiritual recovery, it is a masterful piece of writing. Breath-taking I might call it. That is why I find it so hard to turn the page.

 In my final year of primary school (though it may have been the year prior) our school sent a group of choristers to sing as part of a huge chorus for the Choral Concert at the Sydney Town Hall. As with most big sings, individual schools were responsible for auditioning and teaching the material long before the big night. We would then blend in with the many others gathered en masse before the stern conductor's rod.

I recall passing my audition, which simply involved copying notes from the piano and I remember the night too. Some of the songs we learnt still come to mind, such as Masters in this House, Sumer is icumen in and The Sounds of Silence, the latter a bold attempt, I think, to seem contemporary. In those days I was a boy soprano.

'Sumer is icumen' in is 13th century middle English song sung in canon that produces a rich series of harmonies. I think the version we sang was adapted to a more modern English, though it still still old fashioned at the time. In any event, summer has arrived and I will sing this song again.