One day into the spanking new year and already things start to fall apart. Life is so thinly held together by tenuous threads that are not like the silken webs of our garden Orb spiders! No, nothing so strong and so robust as that. We are fragile animals and our emotional stability even more so. Our inability to truly understand another loved one or to truly see and hear what is happening around us is hyperopic at best. We can’t see what is right in front of our noses but we gaily look out far to some imagined, wonderful horizon and convince ourselves that we can see clearly all the way. The foreground, but of course, is out of focus. And somewhere along the line we quite inadvertently look back over our shoulders and there, in the clearest of all views, is what we couldn’t see when it was right before us. Crystal clear. Unbearably sharp and in focus. Why couldn’t we see it happening when we were living right in it? Why didn’t we notice that things weren’t right? If only, if only … if wishes were horses, beggars would ride … We comfort ourselves with the thought that we only did our best at the time … but is that always true? Aren’t we often afraid of causing change so that we don’t speak up or out or change what we are or are not doing? Fear – the greatest destroyer of all things good.

The good thing about regrets is that if we are honest enough with ourselves, reflective enough to take on the pain and own it, then we can learn. We can accept and move on. It doesn’t make the pain go away, nor does it undo the wrong we perceived has been done. But it does allow us to face whatever it is squarely and acknowledge that it is there and that it is an intrinsic part of us. And then, if we are strong and brave, we can make that regret a strength and a positive for us to inch ever so slightly forward or indeed leap forward if we are lucky.

Like losing someone or something dear to us – it takes a long time to accept the new normal and if we can, we do. It is only when we do that we can really move along. It is only when we can accept our ‘regrets’ – the hurts we have caused and those we have felt, the opportunities missed because our fear was too great or our assumptions misled us – that we can move forward with strength and renewed joy for being alive enough to be able to do so. Each morning we awaken, we are given the chance to live, to love and to address those inadequacies in ourselves that we call regrets.

Today we can change – we cannot rub out the sadnesses of our pasts but we can endeavour to change the sadnesses of our present. We can choose to live with love and to do all that we do with love, for with love, we will find our own peace and create peace around us.

So I’ve a bit of catch-up to play from October last year! Somehow, not quite sure how, but perhaps preparing the household for a dearth of parents while our sons prepared for final school year exams (younger one) and cycling solo across Australia as a jolly(?!) idea to raise funds for the children’s hospital that saved him 10 years earlier (older one – go to the Fixed Heart. Fixed Gears. page for more) had something to do with it?! Then after a solid three weeks away returning to a number of important opportunities was enough to send me into the usual completely focused frenzy that prevents me from doing anything else until whatever it is that pre-occupies me is completed.

And so time marches on – like it always does and Christmas sneaks up on us, as it always does … and the gifts bought in September for overseas still languish in the ‘special’ cupboard and only get parcelled and posted hastily the week before the big day! When will I learn? Some years I have been phenomenal – the whole dining room table covered in tissue paper, glitter, craft glue and pompoms and the occasional cat lolling in his own secret Heaven smack bang in the middle of it, feathers stuck to his nose and tail but purring raucously. All parcelled and posted by the first week of December. But mostly, I am fighting time to get the oranges cut and dried to put on the door wreath with the firehot chillies; getting this ancient knickknack up here and there as each week slips by to only have the setting complete for Christmas Eve. And then it’s nearly over bar the wrapping paper carnage.

So this morning, New Year’s Day 2017, I sit with my first cup of tea for the day – a nostalgic mix of orange pekoe and lapsang souchong (nostalgic because its smokey taste reminds me of the Scottish tea made with peat water) – on our deck under the grape vine, at the small table covered in old Gwenney’s crocheted table cloth and write the first words for the New Year. As my slightly higher dose than normal steroids begin to take effect and my fingers begin to straighten, the restriction in my heel lessens and the aches and pains elsewhere subside, I determine that this year will be the completion of the stories I have begun – including the short ones for this blog. There are the short delights (for me at least) of discovering Ian Fleming and James Bond; of Somerset Maugham and Ashenden; of re-discovering Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ and the fabulous insights of Albie Sachs (‘We, the People’) during the period he was one of the many people who crafted the new constitution for South Africa. But also of my experiences with friends and family – those since gone and those recently born. There is always so much to write about and find succour within.

I have one friend who posts daily on her Facebook page her reason for being grateful that day. She has done it for 2 years now. Her pictures are wonderful insights into the gratitude of being. My father would always point out to me as a child and teenager the small detail that was so easily overlooked but was all the more miraculous for being there than the in your face happening. It was always the small details that meant so much for him and it is with never-ending gratitude that I thank him for instilling that insight in me. Sonja’s daily photos are a reminder to all who see them that it doesn’t take much to be grateful for what we have each day. Any of us who have lived in countries where the disparity between rich and poor is ‘untraversible’ know that for the slightest comfort we are truly blessed: our health (even when it is relatively decrepit) is a blessing as we can seek care and get help to some extent; our families being intact and not torn asunder by regimes, hatred, war, environmental carnage; our education and our freedom to live with decreasing gender bias. And so on.

I sit beneath a grapevine … those five words show how incredibly blessed I am. For that I am intensely grateful. I sit and write into this blog … again the intense privilege imparted by this action. So, as I finish my tea and set down the cup that was made in Zimbabwe and has traveled with me around the world before I settled here in Melbourne, I am grateful for being here geographically and temporally. I am here in 2017. Now that is something for which to be grateful.

All the very best to everyone and wishing you all the success and happiness you can handle for 2017!

Ian Fleming’s ideas and life-view were familiar to one born into an ‘old’ family. I’m not talking ‘old’ as in money or aristocracy as in his case. No, simply that my parents were not Spring chickens when they had me and the age gaps between my brothers and I were not inconsiderable. My parents were from Fleming’s era. My father could not have been more different from him in so many ways, but yet, there were familiar strains to some of the attitudes. Besides which, my dad first introduced me to him and his younger, movie-star friend many years ago, now that I recall! It explained why I found his somewhat out-dated points of view familiar, strangely reassuring although at times disturbingly distasteful. Modernism has thankfully moved us along enough to know that such points of view are now unacceptable. Sadly, though, they still exist en force – listen to the “locker room” talk of Trump and his cronies captured on tape by the Washington Post.

My first contact with Ian Fleming was through this book “The Man with the Golden Typewriter” by his nephew, Fergus, sharing his letters and snippets of adventures. My intrigue built and I was soon contemplating what was really behind this man and his younger more active, movie-star friend. With Fergus’ book on my lap, I would sit over my morning cup of tea, on our back deck under the arch of grape vine, looking across our riotous raspberry canes towards our two soaring Jacarandas that always clung onto one or two cluster of blooms into middle summer. The maggies’ warbling and morning heat would ease my soul while Fergus would share more and more of his uncle’s inner thoughts with me. It wasn’t long before I wanted to know more about his uncle, and soon, my mild curiosity built into a mildly, stimulating obsession!

It’s genetic, you see. Being a Scot and daughter of an engineer, there was little hope for me to be anything other than a pedant! Meticulousness to the point where striving for perfection gets in the way of ‘good’ and then, being fatally flawed – aren’t we all (if we are honest), giving over to mediocrity when reality pushes in and dreams of perfection dwindle with ever-looming deadlines! It leads for a very unfulfilling life at times but at others, pushes one to find out more than perhaps strictly required. Being of such an (ever-so-slightly) obsessional ilk, I have a somewhat irresistible desire to find out about the person behind the projected persona, the culture behind a societal norm, and the wave in history that led to the perfect storm of human denouement … etcetera, etcetera (picture me in classic Yul Brynner ‘King and I’ stance here)! And so it was with Mr Fleming. Two-thirds of the way into his nephew’s book and I was searching for Ian’s non-fiction works – ‘Thrilling Cities’ and ‘The Diamond Smugglers’. The ‘Golden Typewriter’ was proving fascinating for a wannabe ‘orrfur’; the insights to publishing 60 years ago and the strong relationships he had with his editors but also with other phenomenal writers of his time. Somehow, it would be fair to say, if success was based upon who you know, then I am going to be skating on very thin ice to get anywhere! Fleming was surrounded by literary giants: Somerset Maugham who was a close friend, Raymond Chandler a latter life friend – Ian had the proverbial silver, no, Platinum, spoon in his mouth … but he also worked ruddy hard at making his work a success. Now the intrigue was alive again. I had only ever seen James Bond movies. What was Fleming actually like as a writer? His letters were great examples but, perhaps, I should get some of his James Bond books? But first let’s find out about his non-fiction.