Another bloody year begins

It's that time of the year again in which people like Meg Ryan go all goey eyed for 'bouquets of freshly sharpened pencils' and other such school supplies. My summer of discontent is over. The days of sleep and sloth have come to their end, and I haven’t even taking the trouble to rebel against their demise. For I am happy for it to be October again. I feel the nip in the night air once more, see the gentle pale light in the evening, pull my duvet to my neck and think of Halloween and Christmas. This is my favourite time of year, the time of death on the trees but life in the soul. But I like the autumnal evening and winter night not for themselves, but for what happens then. Like ritual and mystery and comically tortured poetry. The handwriting in the first page of my books in school always used to be immaculate. Then on the second a little less so. Flicked through, by the end it might have been a hurried scrawl. What a image of life, and yet not one to be bemoaned. Things fall apart. Entropy just is. But there are always new books and new pages, new pens and choices. We can always take a deep breath and start again. In this way, we live already a renewed life. It is another new academic year and there is another self to come out, another skin to shed to make way for the clean and new. Bears hibernate and waken up for the spring. But I tend to sleep during the summer. But without sleep, there would be no waking up. So I'm glad to be back at work, to have come awake again.