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Tuesday, 24 December 2024

Looking Back on '24: Part 2

Looking back to the late Spring and the Summer of this year, the things I remember most is the unsettled feeling of moving from a trailer in Llanrhian Holiday Park to a small house in Manselton whilst we waited for our home to be fixed up after the housefire in March. I remember the caravan more fondly than the house as I felt that hiraeth of being back home in North Gower. Though, to be fair, the house in Manselton was too bad. This period was marred by a mental detachment I felt, which was probably a self-defence system to stop me getting stressed from the turmoil of our lives in that period of time. This knind of mental numbness made my working life difficult too and I began to hate my job with a passion as I felt 
what I was going through was not really appreciated in the department, where figures and accuracy meant everything. And so I decided to apply for positions in other departments, which I will talk more about in part 3 ps my 2024 round up.

Creatively, I guess I was on form and I finally managed to knock my first and longest novel, Cold Comfort into shape after it had sat in a cupboard drawer untouched for a quarter of a century. After I got that published, I wrote a fanzine on my favourite writer, Guy N Smith. This was a real work of love and seemed to down well with his friends and family, which really pleased me.

With much of our savings lost to the housefire, our holiday this year was reduced from our original plan of a weekend in Brussels, renting a airbnb in Glastonbury and a couple of weeks in Japan to a weekend camping in west Wales with my wife, son and his friends. Whilst enjoying the company and countryside, I also learned that I was getting a little too old to be sleeping on campings beds lol.
One other big event that will always stick in my mind from this time is our evening trip down to Rhossili Cliffs, where the sky turned into fantastic light show as the northern lights graced the British night like never before!