2009

By way of quick and dirty retrospective, here are the first sentences from my blog (or really blogs, as I changed platforms and name in May) for each month of the year. It’s a meme, picked up from The Couch Trip.

1 January:
I just found out from the nice people at Wikipedia that the Catholic Church no longer celebrates 1 January as the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, and hasn’t done since 1960.

1 February:
Penny said I had to blog this, even though I was so bowled over by it that I lost track of how I came upon it, so can’t give proper credit. [It’s a lovely bit of Obamiana.]

3 March:
Yesterday was a big one for the Shaw family. [My niece Paula’s book launch.]

1 April:
Last October I posted a little entry about Nicolas José’s address at the NSW Premier’s History Awards, in which he spoke of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, due for publication in August this year, and mentioned Taam Sze Puy’s bilingual memoir, My Life and Work, published in Innisfail in 1925.

4 May:
A couple of nights ago I had a hugely reassuring phone call from one of the editors of a literary magazine that has accepted a couple of my poems.

1 June:
L K Holt’s man wolf man won the Kenneth Slessor Award this year.

1 July:
I’ve been slack in my self-imposed duty to be a blog of record – that is, to keep you informed about what I get up to by way of going out to stuff in the evenings, often stuff you won’t hear about from the newspapers.

4 August:
Last night my men’s group book group met to talk about Anna Karenina (Anna Karenin, as she’s called in the secondhand copy I bought on Monday), and an excellent evening it was.

3 September:
I haven’t exactly managed a daily post as we walked through the Loire Valley: points d’internet aren’t exactly common and those I have found, when they functioned at all, have had keyboards that drive me crazy.

2 October:
I was on a bus in Connecticut in August when Penny texted me from the airport in Sydney to tell me Yasmin Ahmad had died.

1 November:
This afternoon we visited the White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale, and then went on to Object Gallery to see their part of the exhibition Menagerie.

1 December:
I don’t suppose many people would see an item about youth suicide in Queensland as a good news story, but this story in today’s Sydney Morning Herald marks my niece Kym’s first byline in a major newspaper.

So this year, I’ve been published, and so have my nieces. I’ve travelled, with Penny and without her. People have died. I joined an all-male book group. I’ve tried to blog about all my reading, gallery-going, lecture-attending, and my reading has been, um eclectic –100 books by my count, including comics like Watchmen and revisited children’s books. Obama and Rudd have continued to inspire and disappoint. The past has continued to surprise.

I’m setting this to upload at a minute after midnight. I intend to be sound asleep in a single bed by then, with Penny, sick and infectious with the flu, sleeping in our bed a room away.

Happy 2010!