Looking Forward - 2017

First of all a Happy New Year! We're now just about 14 hours into 2017 and so far all seems well. I'd like to think it will stay that way. Coincidentally we had a New Year e-mail from Son No 1 remarking that however awful some of the things that 2016 brought to the world he and his family had had a good 2016, and he was hoping for more of the same in 2017.

 

I've been saying for a while that 2017 is gong to be a quiet year, a year when we stay in Orkney more, the year when I really knuckle down and make my thesis the most important thing in my life for a while. And if that isn't paving the road to hell with good intentions I don't know what is.

 

See it goes like this. You start off with saying of course we'll stay in Orkney  more. Because apart from the trip to the Conference in Vancouver in June and a brief visit to Stockholm for Jenufa in April we have nothing planned. But then you hear that a good friend is curating an exhibition  at the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution starting in March and you're going to be invited to the opening. And there's the Edinburgh Yarn Festival in March which you have promised to go to with a friend and which happily coincides with the Scottish Opera Edinburgh performances of Pelleas and Melisandre. And there have to be research trips to the National Library and the Edinburgh University Library, so that's looking like a trip south and a week in Edinburgh/Glasgow. It seems the stone for George will be laid in April - March is too tight for the stonemason apparently, which in view of the forgoing is a real shame ...!because I can't not be there for that.  And then the Gaskell Society Conference is in July and I'll want to go to attend and as it's in Portsmouth it would be silly not to use the occasion to visit friends and family in the Suth West. There's a ruby wedding party in Derby in August and in September I've been invited to a Leeds Russian Departmental Reunion for those of us who graduated between 1975 and 1978, and although I'm havering about going I'm well aware that this may be my last chance to see some of the people who taught me all those years ago - two of them have passed on already.

 

So that's how quiet the year looks. But hey! what in all of that  could I pass up?