Are you glad to see the back of 2006? I certainly am. While I have no desire to wish my life away, this has been a year I'd rather not have had.

The funny thing is that it's not just me. I can see from my own astrology chart why I've been having such a bad run - and if I'm realistic, I'll admit that next year will only marginally be better - but it seems all my friends and relations have been having an equally ghastly year. Personally, I've been plagued by bad health, poverty and uncertainty about accommodation, and I can see others having similar problems.

Getting away from the personal, there have been a few good things. Governments, it seems, are finally admitting the reality of climate change. How come pollies are so dense? Climate change has been bleedin' obvious for over a decade! Al Gore's movie must've helped. And there've been some other good movies, too:-) I loved Kenny and Pirates of the Caribbean II best of all the films I saw this year. Thank heaven for good books, good music and good films. Sometimes a bit of escapism is downright necessary.

I wish you all a much better year in 2007, with lots of good reading - and writing, if you're that way inclined! Or whatever else lifts your heart.

And, as Dave Allen used to say, may your god go with you:-)

Omigod, it's almost Christmas! Actually, insofar as such ideosyncracy is possible in our society, I'm opting out. I've sent no cards (although I will write greeting letters to the few friends I won't see and who don't have e-mail) and there's absolutely no money for gifts in my present impecunious state.

I will, however, eat as many mince pies as are on offer. I wait all year for mince pies. As soon as they are in the shops I buy packet after packet, a different one each week; trying out brands, comparing them to my memory of earlier mince pie delights, and especially remembering my mother baking them from scratch. Now those were mince pies! They contained real lard and sundry other strangenesses, and omigod, they were good! No mince pies since have borne comparison, but that doesn't mean I won't keep looking...and buying...and tasting. Mmmmmm...

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Eight weeks ago, I moved from Perth, Western Australia to Mount Gambier, South Australia, a distance of over fifteen hundred miles. I think that's about 2,500km if your mind works that way. Mine doesn't. I mislike these metres, litres and kilograms, forsooth.

Anyhow, here I am in the space between the worlds, so to speak, or at least, between lifestyles. The last quarter of the year isn't a good time to move; certainly not if you're an inveterate joiner, like me. I miss the groups I belonged to in Perth: the WA Shakespeare Club; the Society of Editors (WA); the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre, especially the Spec-Fic group and the cousin-twice-removed face-to-face critiquing group that I value so highly; the WA Society of Genealogists (specifically the Western Suburbs House Group) and the WA School of Yoga, to say nothing of the many individuals I met in other contexts such as Buddhism, Meditation and Astrology which I've moved away from to some degree in recent years. Those groups and the people in them cannot be replaced. Of course, I'll meet new friends and join other groups over here, but therein lies the rub - everything is winding down for the summer break, and just as things start to wind up again I'll be on my way to England. So, in fact, I won't be joining any groups here until the middle of next year. Nor can I look for part-time work, which I really need to supplement the pension. (It's funny how everything else is going up, but not the pension - it gets harder and harder, month by month, to feed and clothe oneself, to say nothing of luxuries like health insurance and internet access.)

So how, you might ask, am I managing to travel to England? It's courtesy of my sister Clare, who lives there and always has, having elected to remain when the rest of the family emigrated in the fifties. It will be wonderful to see her and other rellies, and also the many e-cousins I've met through my family history research. My last chance to see the old country - now, that's exciting! It's something I'm really looking forward to, although I won't let myself get too excited this early or I'll be like a kid in the weeks before a birthday: only sixty more sleeps; forty-nine; twenty-four... No, I'll be patient and try to live day by day until St Valentine comes and carries me back to Perth, whence I fly out to Dubai and then Heathrow - whoopee!

Meantime, I'm in limbo. Not only am I failing to settle in properly here in Mount Gambier, but my life seems to be on hold. I've done precious little writing these last few months. It hardly seems worth doing much to my new flat - after all, anything could happen before next June and I could well have to move again by then. Yet one can waste a lifetime through inaction - I'll just wait until after Christmas, until I get a job, until the plot of the novel clarifies, until, until, until.

My Buddhist training is niggling me about being present in this very moment and not allowing myself to be ruled by attachment to past or future. Every week in limbo is a week wasted, but any other action--or non-action--seems too hard. But is Too Hard a good reason for dawdling in limbo? I'll think about it and let you know:-)

I've always though I couldn't write short stories. Not that I haven't tried: I have, many times. But after about 5,000ww I've always realised that what I'd thought was a little story was turning into a novel, complete with subplots and a cast of thousands.

But something must've clicked in my brain, because I've written two shorts in the last month. What's more, they're completely different from each other: one's a dark fantasy and only about 2,000ww and the other is a soufle-style historical piece of about 6,500ww.

Even if neither ever gets published I feel I've accomplished something worthwhile. I can't help but wonder, though, how much of my sudden interest in shorts is displacement activity because I don't want to have to start the new novel...