happy new year, everyone. may the champagne flow freely, the object of your desire be within arm's reach for a good snogging and the next 366 days (don't forget, 2004 is a leap year!) be full of bright, shiny loveliness.

hello, kids! it's that time of year again, time to shout 'out with the old and in with the new!' time to symbolically start again. and you know what that means...resolutions!

i have spent many years making those big traditional resolutions--you know, quit smoking, go to the gym, give up...whatever. and i've never really been able to adhere to them. so this year, i'm taking a different approach. on the advice of a good friend, i'm regarding my resolutions more as a to do list, full of things that i would really help make the year a better one. so, here they are, in all their glory:

1. drink a glass of cranberry juice every morning.
2. listen to more al green.
3. leave the city at least once every six weeks, even if this just means taking the metro north commuter rail to some little hamlet in westchester county.
4. worry less, or at least try and keep things in perspective.
5. make another attempt to plow through 'gravity's rainbow'

and that's what's on the table at the moment. suggestions for additions, augmentations and substitutions are welcomed.

what's on your to-do list?

i wanted to write something incisive and brilliant about how nice it is to be home (which it really is), about how excited i am to see everyone and how good it feels to be back in my nice cozy apartment...but that will have to wait. for now let's just say this: getting picked up at the airport is the best thing in the world, particularly when the one waiting at the end of the arrival chute looks at you as though christmas has finally arrived, in your big red suitcase and four days late. 

so, while i've learned my lesson about making idle boasts (note to self: never agree to enter tournaments built on random fluke victories), i am pleased to note that from time to time, i seem to be able to wield a shotgun with a decent amount of acuity.

which, of course, means i hit two clay pigeons the whole morning. little buggers didn't stand a chance.

yesterday was this family's equivalent of a reunion, with three of the five aunties in one place, several uncles, plenty of long lost cousins and even some of their children. having not seen any of them in quite a few years, it was wild. the thing is, despite the fact that we all looked a little different, and that most of the assembled company had eight million questions about my life in new york (i got to tell my september 11 story about six times), it was much the same as i remembered it. card tournaments, sherry trifle, free-flowing beer, racing pigeons, christmas crackers...really, the only major changes were that i was suddenly the tallest person in the room, but not the youngest.

refreshing.

joan is a family friend, and she is eighty if she is a day. here is an example of why i absolutely adore her:

joan: may you have a happy, healthy and loved christmas. and new year. with lots of sex.

apparently, i am even more dismal at pool than i previously thought. and let me tell you, that's pretty impressive! though, apparently i can twirl a cue like nobody's business, with plenty of menace and resolve.

but that is no matter, because despite all the hype of the infamous tournament, that wasn't really the point of the evening at all, was it? no no no. the point of the evening, at least as far as i was concerned, was that i got to meet this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one in the flesh, and see my darling girlies again for the first time in ages. there was whisky and chattering and giggling and of course plenty of tramping around camden town. and, of course, i have photos. i will post them as soon as i figure out how to extract them from the dratted camera (including, yes, some stellar photos of stuart wearing my cap at a jaunty angle).

the only thing missing, of course, was the lovely third member of the troika, who we missed very much, particularly during our 2am ritual feeding down on old compton street, where we cackled madly about accents and changed the subject very smoothly (look, i've got water!), even as the good mark tried vainly to teach us some cockney rhyming slang. though there was absolute fiesta of fierce fabulous femaleness about that table (with which mark coped gracefully), we missed our owlet. of course, the prevailing theory is that if she'd managed to actually be there with us, the sheer power of the troika plus two would have caused the planets to realign, the heavens to turn themselves inside out, and basically the end of the world as we know it.

that's right. we can do that, when you put us all together. make no mistake.

anyway. i'm not doing the scene any justice really, but suffice it to say that it was a smashup good time, and though by the end of it my throat was sore and i was pretty much exhausted, i can't wait to do it all over again. for real.

we interrupt this morning to inform you that there are bagpipers in the field next to my bedroom window.

bagpipers.

apparently, they tend to swarm this time of year.

last night, i accompanied the fam to a carol service at the local church. as stuart said, 'hm. they're really giving you a  proper rural british christmas, aren't they?'

to which i affect my finest plummy accent and say: 'damn skippy.'

let me start by saying i was absolutely right, that the whole notion of sleeping in a room that is both silent as the tomb and dark as agent cooper's coffee is both disorienting and self-indulgent. after retiring at the shy hour of eleven last night, i slept through till about 12:30 out here, wrapped in feather bed and darkness.

of course, that could have something to do with the fact that i'd been awake for about two days prior to my lovely sleep.

yes, ladies and gentlemen, i have arrived on british soil. the journey was an adventure, though hardly one worthy of an adventure novel. i left my house in a made frantic dash, having frittered the day away with d., doing not much of anything at all. i packed in about five minutes and hurled myself out the door just as the taxi arrived; i am still wondering if i left the coffee pot on, or if my house is an inferno as i type.

arriving at the airport, i was met by the typical jfk scene--a line for check in that stretched somewhere to the middle of the departures lounge. utter chaos. but, i survived without mangling anyone (an actual danger, considering i hate both flying and crowds; they tend to make me testy), and made my way to the departures lounge, somewhere in the next terminal.

once i'd arrived and armed myself with the requisite trashy magazine, i was called to the desk, whereupon i was informed that i had been miraculously bumped up to business class.

this, naturally, led me to believe that i was going to die a horrible fiery death in return. i even had to call the biscuit to get him to convince me otherwise. you see, i had had a Very Good Few Days. so good, in fact, that i was certain that retribution would have to be had (i'm not very good at accepting large swathes of goodness; it's a balance thing)--i was on my way to england to see many people i love and do many fun things; i'd had a lovely little soiree the previous night; my occasional ability to avoid doing something stupid or be a complete jackass has kept me in good company; work can kiss my ass for ten days; and now, i'm suddenly confronted with the fact that i was going to have edible food and leg room on a transatlantic flight. terrifying.

but, i arrived in tact and on time, simply Blew through immigration and customs, and now i'm here, in our family's tiny tudor cottage, engaging in conversations about who is going to be redoing the thatching and the fact that the front door now looks like something out of a medieval torture chamber and smashing my head on the rafters. planning the inevitable christmas day trivial pursuit tournament (british edition circa the 1970's; hardly fair) and tomorrow's pool-to-the-death extravaganza.

see? my apartment simply HAS to be burning. 

and now, if you'll excuse me, i have some horlick's to drink and a fireplace to drape myself in front of.

bwa ha ha haaaa!