Sunday, January 02, 2005
Back To Zero, An Acceptance and GDR
With the holiday over and 2005 well and truly welcomed, it was time to pack up and leave the lodges. The car was packed solids with gifts received from friends and family and food and drink not consumed, and we all gathered in the Forth Inn for a bar lunch before going our separate ways.
The food is delicious in the Forth, but we were forced into it due to our friend who owns the hotel in town deciding at the last minute to go to Spain for the New Year. He left us the keys to his bar though – amazingly we never took him up on the offer.
The last of the laughs were had before it was hugs all round in the car park. The snow that had threatened last night had cleared leaving a clear and cold sky overhead. This made driving not the easiest with some extreme glares hitting us as we passed down towards Stirling then onwards to Edinburgh.
It won’t be too long before I see my friends again – some of us are going to a Stag Weekend in Newcastle in the 15th. One thing that delights me is Gail saying how much she enjoyed this year. There were some testing times for us in 2004 and we needed to get away and really let our hair down, forget about reality in the company of friends. No matter how long we are apart from these people, there is always great friendship and respect so that it is never an issue. Gail feels she has totally settled with the group and is relaxed in their company which is something she found difficult at first – just how laid back we all are. To outsiders it feels like unorganised complacency; to us it is going with the flow and levelling all our lives out again.
Back home I checked my email; a couple of hundred and an excellent surprise met my eyes. Wildchild Publishing have accepted my story Heart of a Child for the February issue. What a superb start to the year and what a jolting reminder I have to finish off my GDR 2005 and get it published on this Blog asap.
