NEW YEAR'S EVE

The dark sky flashed with light. Distant explosions boomed and crackled, reverberating and echoing between the silhouetted houses. Silent blankets of cloud billowed across the stars, smothering the night in a wall of coloured smoke, peppered by the tiny glow of Chinese lanterns caught by the night-wind.

This was New Year's Eve, and I was at my Aunty and Uncle's house, clutching a sparkler and shivering in the garden. I'd been thinking about what to do for most of the day. My Dad had got stressed when my Mum tried to change their plans at lunchtime. They had initially intended to go to a prayer meeting.

"I'm either going to that," he'd said, folding his arms crossly, "Or I'm staying here." My Mum went silent and cleared away the lunch things. I don't get involved. In the end, they did come up with a compromise: we all went up to Tilehurst at around 8pm and then they toddled off to their other thing at 10:30. So it was that I ended up with my extended family in Tilehurst at midnight, waving a sparkler like a loon when the numbers ticked over.

So ends Betwixtmas then. Later, the rain lashed against my bedroom window and the wind howled and buffetted and whipped through the trees. The year was off to a stormy start. It's a scary place, the top of the year. I went to bed feeling as though I was precariously perched with the unknown stretching before me, vast and terrible, kind and wonderful and every other permutation of possibilities.

I remembered last year when we'd walked over to the village green to set off a Chinese lantern of our own. Each of us had written a prayer or a hope or a dream on a flap of the flimsy paper and in the calm cold air, we'd watched the lantern gently float over the village.

This year feels a little different.