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New Year memories can be strange, and stranger still. I have several that I would like to share with you:
To see a new year, with a whole new passel of friends, makes me happy indeed. And to think the last one could have had that leaden peal of finality. Instead, here we are. I am hopeful for the lot of us and I believe that we can only become closer still in the coming months.
So cheers to all of you.
New Years 1917. Piled into a dugout with my brothers in arms, telling stories and shivering through the mud. Tompkins got a pack of cigarettes and he shared them. We all took a sip of coffee (rum, really. When soldiers tell you they had coffee, it was rum.) out of the same mug and slept as sound as we dared. New Years 1919. Our world had come to an end, but those of us who made it through were desperate to sear the new one with our presence. We caroused, we sucked in life, we celebrated one another. Soon after midnight, I lost my mates following a girl with a green ribbon in her hair through Piccadilly Circus. New Years 1921. I had a new wife and an Italian family. We celebrated with the Palatine Hill as our backdrop, and me swearing in another life I had been a charioteer in the Circus Maximus. My little bird didn't like that, she didn't. But she smiled all the same.
To see a new year, with a whole new passel of friends, makes me happy indeed. And to think the last one could have had that leaden peal of finality. Instead, here we are. I am hopeful for the lot of us and I believe that we can only become closer still in the coming months.
So cheers to all of you.