I find there is something slightly melancholy about New Year’s Eve. Saying goodbye to a year, to times not to be lived again. No matter what the year has brought, good, bad or just average, the passing of a year has a sadness about it.

I don’t know if what I’m about to reveal is unusual or many people think along the same lines, but I’m going to say it anyway. I see years, individual years, in my mind’s eye, as a ring of time. A ring is perhaps not quite a perfect description as the ring is squashed so that it almost has sides. It’s also not a ring I could draw as it changes shape depending on whether a point of the year is considered from within that particular time or from within another. The ring isn’t uniform in colour but has shades and subtle hues. As the year draws to a close, the ring is very dark, almost to be black; a work of the dark nights no doubt, but also of a year fulfilled – like a glass of water, the yet-to-be-lived year, becomes increasingly dark as more ink of time is added.

But waking on New Year’s Day, standing within the mass of the ring, there is a blinding white light of renewal; the bright sun is shining straight through the clear water in the glass, not clouded by time yet to be lived. January and February are at the top of the ring but March is on the first real bend which flows down into April and May; these months turning into warmer colours of yellow, with June darker and flowing round a long bend into July. August is the flat bottom of the year and orange and is followed by another month on a bend, September. The autumn months are monochrome but become increasingly darker as they head back up the last side of the ring and turn into December as it reaches the top.

Well, as it’s New Year’s Day, everything is brightly white; well, it would be if it wasn’t grey, miserable and raining outside! But anyway, I need to fill the year and I have plans. I need to continue doing some things: wildlife surveys for Cheshire Wildlife Trust and BTO, species protection shifts (ospreys, and others, possibly), setting fire to trees and I’ve got two weeks on RSPB Ramsey Island in May. There are some things I need to do more of including photography (I’ve got a new camera that needs more use) and I’ve just bought a fitness tracker which is already making be slightly obsessed about burning calories and I need to get even fitter this year – cycling, walking, running and I want to get back into Mountain biking.

However, I also need to do even more new things and go to new places. Well, I don’t have all these new things planned yet but I have one big one in the diary so far – visiting a new continent; I’ve got a trip to Botswana planned in April. I also want to visit new places closer to home and am planning a week somewhere in Scotland and some long weekends in new places in the English countryside (there’s also a little new thing in the form of my new nephew to meet for the first time!)

And, of course, I’m going to write about all this on the pages of my blog.

Happy New Year!