Mac's Musings
Happy New Year!
01/01/2008I have never been big on New Year festivities. A home-cooked meal, a good book, a small malt whisky and asleep by 10.30pm always seems like the right way to celebrate Hogmanay.
But last night we decided to herald in 2008 on a Peak District summit. Partner Judy, 16-year-old daughter Hannah, five-year-old visla bitch Aster and I set off at 11pm, yomping across muddy fields and along dark country lanes towards Taxal Edge.
Aster thought all her Christmases and New Years had come at once when she put up a fox in the first field and high-tailed into the dark as any self-respecting hunter-pointer should. We watched her quartering the field in the gloom, or rather followed the unearthly spectre of her apparently disembodied flashing collar as it zipped to and fro.
It might just have been the same fox that turned up at 3am on our terrace ten days ago, triggering the security light and inducing territorial outrage in Aster and Vita the cat. Mr Tod gazed quizzically at them through the French windows as if he owned the place. I mean, the cheek of it! Our pets haven't been so united since cornering next door's moggie in the greenhouse - more NIMBY than the local council's planning committee.
Anyway, ten minutes before 2008 we took our seats on a heathery knoll and fortified ourselves with hot Bovril laced with nips of dark rum. The cusp of 2007/2008 was warm and breathlessly still. We mused that perhaps global warming wasn't all bad news.
A trio of village churches far below us in the valley chimed in the New Year and a dozen fireworks displays erupted with flashes and pops - the pops arriving a couple of seconds after the multi-coloured pyrotechnics. A quarter of an hour into the New Year all was quiet again.
We followed Aster's collar - flashing like rubies - back down the track, across dew-sodden pastures and were snugly tucked up in bed by 1.15am.
Happy New Year. Here's to a Great 2008!
