New Year’s Eve has always had an odd effect on me.

Not one for drinking to excess or dancing the night away, I always seem to find myself at some party or gathering taking a moment to stare into empty space in the lead-up or wake of the fireworks. I get knocked around by an overwhelming sense of melancholy for no discernible reason whatsoever.

This year there might have been some reason. We were in my mother’s living room watching Paul Kelly and friends playing a live concert for no-one, but broadcast live to the nation as we all cowered in our houses from the Corona Virus. I’m sure he’s the poetic soul of the nation and all that, but Paul Kelly really doesn’t put me in the mood for celebrating. Like every other Australian I know, I make gravy out of a packet.

I think what messes with my head is the significance of the milestone on one hand, coupled with a sense of the arbitrary meaningless of it on the other. Like so many others, I was keen to see the end of 2020. While it has been a year of joy in some ways and has brought about some amazing adaptive innovations in how we operate, it has also been a year of frustrations and of constantly stifled ambitions. And now here we are on the first day of 2021 and as U2 (and probably half a dozen or so other pock-rock song writers) put it: Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.

I kind of disappeared from the blog a bit there too, didn’t I? Don’t worry, I haven’t contracted anything deadly or given up on writing or any of it. I just lost a sense of what I wanted to be writing about, almost as comprehensively as I lost the sense of what I was trying to with anything. For a while there it was just one community theatre flyer after another. Plus a few pictures of Scallywag.

The truth is last year I was in the first year of formation to become a minister in the Uniting Church. I had my head down writing assignments and reading all the things. I didn’t have a lot of time for theatre, and there wasn’t much on for most of the year thanks to the pandemic.

Oh Yeah. And we had a baby. That does complicate things rather somewhat. But rest easy: whatever else this blog becomes, it will not, while ever I have administrator access, become a mummy-blog. I assume there’s such a thing as a daddy-blog, but it’s not going to be that either.

I don’t often make new-year’s resolutions, largely because of the aforementioned uneasiness with the arbitrary nature of the new year celebration itself. But this year I have resolved to write more. I don’t know what it’s going to be. I don’t know if it will appear here or be consigned to the boundless abyss that is the “Projects I’m working on” folder on my hard drive. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see a return to the glory days of my twenties when I’d be pumping out a passionate opinion about a new sociological issue every fortnight. I doubt it. More likely I’ll be converting practice sermons into blog posts and howling my theological revelations into the void of cyberspace. That’s what a blog is for, right?

I don’t know. Whatever.

Make of that what you will and give my love to Angus.

Garry with 2 Rs

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