Well, as the times get all Epiphanoidal, and the various turn-of-the-year-ish thingies start to fade into the old backward and abysm¹, this must be absolutely my last legitimate chance to tell you all about my New Year's Resolutions, and specifically (among all the usual boring ones: to exercise less; and to eat more fatty foods; and to drink more strong drink; and to take up smoking and the like) specifically the one that applies to these essays. So: solemnly I resolve to stop treating these essays as a sort of personal diary, or even worse, as a blog, and to, henceforth eschewing all personal references, to make them more generally applicable and therefore more interesting to someone other than me.

Anyway my two younger kids have just returned to their mother up in New York after spending their Christmas with me in Texas. I'm sure that you remember the back story to this; how, a couple of summers ago, at the end of a short visit to her in Ithaca, she completely forgot to return them: it just slipped her mind---and all you know how easy that is. Anyway: ... so they have been living with her for the last two and a half years and now we've finally got round to having them down to visit me.

They of course decided to come down by train rather than trouble the airlines at this time, as they felt it to be much more exciting that way and, as sort of ginger on the guilt-bread, they would have the added delight of missing two days of school. They arrived the day before Christmas Eve, bringing with them a herd of other kids they seemed to have picked up at the Plano station---some of whom I vaguely recognised, and I ended up buying Chinese take-away for what suddenly seemed like an appreciable fraction of the population of China: even more so once we'd started watching that movie "Serenity" with all those Chinese swear words in it---wouldn't surprise me in the least if it's 'PG-13' rating wasn't upped to 'R (for language)' in China.

While, as I said, I did recognise some of their friends, the same could hardly be said for Hereb and Rowie who had sprouted out of all recognition just like that fast growing bamboo that they stick under your fingernails when you've been extraordinarily renditionified.

I think that's an extraordinarily spiteful act: I mean the growing and changing like that. In good faith I sent Ann a couple of sweet little kiddies (well not so little in Hereb's case ... and not so sweet either, come to think of it) and here she's sent back these two enormous creatures bouncing around my apartment (in Hereb's case like a giant sloth on speed, which is quite an achievement) and eating everything in sight (and perhaps even everyone---I never did see the mailman after that first day).

And now, now they've gone; and all I'm left with is a fridge and a freezer full of food that is not my food and is not food that I am likely to consume any time soon.

And the pictures.

Almost as interesting as the difference between how they are supposed to be (i.e. how I remember them from last time I saw them) and how they are now, is the difference between them. This is epitomised by the pictures, I mean it wouldn't be Christmas without the pictures and Rowie had me take about three hard drives' worth of photos of her in the eleven days she was here: she posed, primped, postured, pranced almost pleaded for pics at every point; whereas Hereb only appears occasionally as a startled and resentful bit player in some of them. In fact he took many more---orders of magnitude more---photos than he appeared in: mainly strange, unlovely and experimental ones full of rage against the machine (a group he rather likes) and disdain for the mundanities of focus and lighting.

Oh!

Oh dear, that really wasn't keeping to my resolution at all, was it? But, hey, look on the bright side I probably won't keep all the other ones, the ones that were going to be bad for me (if not necessarily for you) either, so...

Cheerio for now

from Richard Howland-Bolton