LADYBIRD

There's a ladybird here, sitting very happily on top of an unopened bottle of mead. She's quite content. She just flicked her wings and tickled her back legs. I'm sitting here on New Year's Eve too, twizzling a corkscrew, watching her and waiting.

I can't bring myself to flick her off. It doesn't seem right somehow. I've rotated the bottle a few times but she hasn't moved. Neither is there any reason why she should. We're all entitled to enjoy New Year's Eve however we choose. And I'll be honest, the mead can wait.

I was going to do another grand old review of 2016. How the first few months were all paint and curtains, the Spring was hay fever, and the rest, a sort of sleepless whirlwind, right up until last week. But there are more than enough reviews of this year to go around. It may well be talked about for decades to come, and for a great many reasons. For me, the year 2016 has felt like two steps forward, two steps back, but where I've landed is not quite in the same universe as where I started.

I suppose a lot of us feel like that at the end of this unpredictable rollercoaster. Wandering round in circles on top of a cork.

So, tonight then.

I'm with family later. We'll almost certainly play Mexican Train Dominoes (like normal dominoes but with tiles that go up to twelve) and then see the New Year in with a bottle-pop and a clink of glasses. The telly will go on and London will once again be ablaze with fireworks while Big Ben chimes out across the exploding cityscape. Fast away the old year passes, will sing my heart, and hope will rise in me again for the new one.

Then we'll be off, hurtling into an even less foreseeable year. I sense change.

The ladybird is happy. She might just be loving the attention. It is possible, I suppose, that she's forgotten that she can fly, and that the world is greater and wider and braver and kinder than she knows, once she learns how to let go of it. I tap the bottle. She flicks open her wings. Come on, little ladybird, it's time. It is time.