Happy New Year!

Various things have struck me in the last few days about our lives up in Yorkshire.
I suppose that coming to the end of our first full year here has put my mind in reflective mode.

I'm still not completely settled into this new life. So much change and upheaval is obviously going to take an awful long time to get used to.
But in many ways, I hope I never really get used to it. That is always a possibility. Assuming a good, long life of 70+ I'll have spent half my life in the Midlands as a city boy and half my life as a rural townie up here in Pocklington. It is feasible then that a large part of me will always see myself as a city boy.
Similar, I suppose to the mental image you have of yourself, the life snapshot you take of yourself and place in your self-image section of your brain. Mine was taken sometime in 1990 or there abouts and no matter what the birth certificate says or the mirror shows, I'll always think of myself as a wide eyed 20 something.
I imagine Molly will have no such problems, as a transfer at age 7 should be considerably easier than my transfer at 36.

But whether I ever completely settle into this Yorkshire life is immaterial.
I find myself regularly amazed at the life I'm suddenly leading up here. I can't believe that just 15 months ago I was finishing up my Birmingham life, packing up 35 years of city boy living and preparing to swap it all for life in rural Pocklington.

All it takes is a little thing, looking up in the sky and seeing the gliders overhead, taking a walk around town end to end in 10 whole minutes, or maybe just looking up at night at my Yorkshire sky.

And then I realise that I'll never even think of going back, that nothing in the world could be better than the life we have up here.

There may be a part of me that is forever a city boy, but over the last year I've realised that the city boy only really needs an occasional visit to Birmingham to get his city fix. For the rest of he year I'm simply happy being the townie up here.

So Happy New Year everyone, from Bruton Mansions up here in beautiful, small, rural, idyllic, peaceful Pocklington,
My home.

Happy New Year to you all.