Days of Gratitude - This Is The End, The Final Days of 2016

2016 is over.  If you are reading this then you survived all the highs and lows and the joys and sorrows.  Well done.  Give yourself a pat on the back.

This is the end.  The final set of gratitude diary entries.  It's January now and the first day in a year on which I'm deliberately not posting anything.  For me it's served its purpose and I am moving on to whatever exciting things happen this year.

2017 is the year for doing.  That was in part of a message received yesterday by/through a friend.  She's crazy but she speaks sense.  This is a year for doing.  Not just talking but doing.  Getting on with it.  Getting on with whatever the vision is and with embracing self and others and walking the path.  That's what my friend said anyway.  And do you know what?  On this occasion I believe her.

Perhaps the song by The Doors isn't appropriate.

Because this isn't just the end.

This is the beginning.


26^th December

Grateful to have tidied a room. I can now see the desk table again.

I put things on the walls again, securely, that had fallen off.

And my collapsing Catholic pictures now have the addition of a ten foot rosary, an essential item for any forty foot tall Catholic enthusiasts.

27^th December

Grateful for new writing ideas and for hope.

Grateful for sorting out the CDs I cleared out months ago and that selling some of them - not the ones in the picture - should nearly pay for my Lit & Phil membership. 

28^th December 

Grateful that I can move on from a game obsession after a week of wasting too much time.

I have reached this point.

 

Let's just ignore the thousands of user made levels and move on. A good idea!

29^th December

Crappy day of a PIP tribunal that didn't happen. They adjourned it. It was not pleasant.

Grateful for these tasty treats forming a most unhealthy dinner.

31^st December

Grateful to have spent the end of the year as I wish to begin the new. With family, crazy people, and friendship. With reading and writing. With walking and seeing the sea. With meditation. And with a lot of hope.

Grateful too for the way Blob Thing helped me in 2016. It's his first birthday.

Days of Gratitude - It's Getting Very Near The End

Yes it is.  It's getting very near the end.  I wanted to present to you The Beatles recording of the reprise of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band.  Unfortunately all the YouTube videos of that have been blocked on copyright grounds.  And that means that none of you will hear the performance and rush out and buy the album.  Instead, here's Cheap Trick.

The end is over.  It's January 1st 2017 and my challenge to post every day in the Sunday Assembly Gratitude Group for a year is complete.  I didn't quite succeed.  On average I missed posting on one day a month.  Now I'm moving onto other things.  I've started a blog to post free writing on as many days as I can manage it, without worrying about quality although hoping that generally the quality will improve as the year continues.  That blog can be found here.  I've started another blog in which I want to consider the Gospels from the New Testament from my post-church, post-Christian, post-theist perspective.  I also know that there will be many things I write this year that won't ever see daylight.  I'm just going to enjoy myself with it.

The gratitude posts helped me a lot in 2016 but in all honesty I am glad to be leaving them behind.  Maybe if the group had remained a place where lots of people posted I'd be happy to stay.  But it didn't.  There are so few of us and I know it's time to move on, with gratitude for the memories and gratitude for the change.

You can almost tell in these entries - or perhaps you can tell without a shadow of a doubt - that I have been quite looking forward to leaving it all behind.

I sit here on the afternoon of January 1st 2017 with reading books, writing books and with a Bible I wasn't expecting to be reading.  I sit here with unformed plans and hopes and know that the year will contain surprises, triumphs and setbacks.   I sit here believing that 2017 is a year for living more fully than I have ever lived before.

21^st December

Grateful for a quiet day. The tree is up but undecorated!

Grateful for reading, silly games, DVDs.

Grateful that though the exercise from the physio is (swear word) painful it should do some good for my spine and leave it slightly less the wrong shape.

22^nd December

Grateful that people have liked the story I posted a few days ago.

Maybe it could be edited, proof read (it has typos!) and tweaked and submitted somewhere for next Christmas.

23^rd December

Grateful that all the shopping is finished without too much pain.

Grateful that none of the things I had to in town were Christmas related and that they included seeking refuge in the Lit & Phil and browsing a magazine about writing.

Think I'm going to enjoy using that place as a refuge. Once I've bought myself a decent flask so I don't have to pay for tea that comes in mugs that aren't large enough and isn't chai.


24^th December

Grateful to have free written something about Christmas in addition to the 15,000 word story posted a few days previously.

https://theautisticwanderer.blogspot.co.uk/…/happy-christma…

Grateful to have photos from my childhood, showing a few edited highlights of those years.

This photo isn't in the blog but was taken on Christmas Day 1974.

25^th December

Grateful for a quiet day at home with no pressures and pain au chocolat for breakfast.

Beth bought me some maps and books.

Days of Gratitude - Creativity, Charity, Cafes, Carousels, Coaches. And Darkness.

Five more days.  They were good days.  I spent them in Manchester staying with an awesome person, the creator of my soft toy Blob Thing.  She's a very busy person these days, excelling in her passion and slowly working her way towards her dream.  I believe that she will achieve that dream.  She has found her niche and it's a place where that great passion is combined with a talent and definite flair and I believe that she is going to affect the lives of lots of people in a very positive way as she continues to walk this path.  Autistic children will benefit massively and so will their parents/guardians and those around them.  They already do benefit massively but this is only the beginning.  One of my joys over the past sixteen months since meeting her has been to watch the way she has run down this path with such total enthusiasm and to watch the way that she has begun to create something pretty damn marvellous.  When I met her this thing did not exist anywhere but her head.  And now it does.  And there is much more in her head to become a physical reality at time progresses.  I am looking forward to watching it happen.

Five more days.  Since Amanda is so busy I now have to occupy myself quite a bit when I'm there.  I am finding ways to occupy myself and know that there is never a cause for me to be bored either when reading and writing at her house or when I go out - walking, visiting a town, writing in the library, or finding new places and people.

This visit was no exception and below you will find a few things I am excited about.  And a cafe that I'll be returning to.  It even has convenient plug sockets for a laptop.  Southport has also given me a writing prompt for a story that is churning in my head right now.  At some point it will come to rest and I'll know the broad outline of the tale.  But that's not something for now.  I'll just tell you it involves palmistry and an impossible fortune becoming possible.

Something else.  I am typing this at the Literary and Philosophical Society Library.  I joined today.  Yes, I am now officially a member.  I plan to spend lots of time here writing and reading.  Perhaps there will be people to meet too and it will become the source of more surprises in my life.  I hope so.

16^th December


Grateful to have found amazing places and things while having to spend hours in Manchester city centre without a plan.

Here:

A brilliant free creative space in Afflecks. With a possibility something similar might happen one day in Newcastle.

The awesome art cafe.

Some great street art.

So many pictures to choose from.

17^th December

Grateful for a great day with Amanda in Southport.

Chips, ice cream, charity shops, a carousel, and tea. Our kind of day.

And it was the first time I have ever seen the sea it Southport. On every other visit it was miles away.

18^th December

Grateful for darkness and light.  The not-church church I attended in Manchester was based on the theme of darkness.  I liked the people there.  I don't think it would be "my" place but I did like them and I liked the honesty and openness that was greater than that seen in most church churches.

And grateful for the women's toilets here in Nexus Art Cafe.

Yep, a gratitude post about a toilet.

19^th December

Grateful to spend most of the day with Amanda.

We caught the bus to Leigh for charity shops and to visit a very good cafe there.

A screen in the cafe displays slideshows of someone's photos. As I was paying I noticed the photos at that moment were of Newcastle.

20^th December

Grateful to have achieved the front seat on the coach back from Manchester.

Grateful for an easy journey.

And grateful for roast chicken. Because I am still a corpse eating monster.

Days of Gratitude - Tea, Cafes and The Rocky Road To Manchester

Five more days.  The solstice will soon be with us and then Christmas.  And then the close of this year of gratitude.  I'm still undecided on what will replace the gratitude diary next year.  How about this:

http://thinkwritten.com/365-creative-writing-prompts/

or this:

https://dailypost.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/365-days-of-writing-prompts-1387477491.pdf

Each of those contains a writing prompt for each day of the year.  I think personally I prefer the look of the first set.  I also have a couple of books with daily writing prompts.
Maybe that should be the replacement.  A short piece of writing every day from a prompt.  It would be both enjoyable and a challenge.  I wouldn't be too religious about it or force myself to catch up if I missed it every day for a week.

At this point I don't know how my writing will develop in 2017, how much I'll be sitting in the Lit & Phil Library, whether I'll be entering any competitions or submitting any work in the hopes some editor will like it and publish it.

At this point I don't particularly care what I'll find out about those things.  I do expect my writing will develop, that I will be sitting in the Lit & Phil, and that I will probably see some competitions or calls for submission that look enjoyable enough to play with and not care about so-called "success".

So here, five more days of gratitude.

I type this while sitting in the Nexus Art Cafe in Manchester.  In a couple of hours I'll be back in Salford.  I arrived here at 10.30 for a not-church church thing called Sanctus and stayed to write and be in a nice place for a while.  If you're in Manchester I can highly recommend the place.  Unless you need wheelchair access or can't deal with steps.  It's in a deep basement - with a window into a back courtyard - and the place doesn't have a lift.  Apart from that, I can vouch for the toasties, the tea, and the cake.  Also the toilets.  They're pretty cool too.

I spot that I haven't posted anything apart from gratitude posts recently - unless you include Blob Thing's blog which has been a little wild recently.  I'll try to post something else soon.  I hope to get a story posted here by Christmas.  It's a Christmas story so it should be posted by Christmas!  I'm quite happy with it and, at 15,000 words, is by far the longest piece of fiction I've ever written.

It's all progress.  Looking forward to the progress of 2017.  It's going to be special.

11^th December


Grateful to have been able to spend more time than expected with a friend.

Grateful for her treating me to lunch at Tea Sutra.

And that she wrote something meaningful for me.

12^th December


Grateful the new printer works so I have been able to print the Christmas story for a friend so she can be the first to read it.

Grateful too for a year old memory shared.

Cheating - but it's the only photo!

13^th December

Grateful for a quiet day.

Grateful for new internet, and new electricity and gas meters.

Glad to have finished two of my many unfinished books. That's almost miraculous.


14^th December


Grateful to have found the item I needed to complete Amanda's present.

Grateful for everything said at the school parents' evening.

Grateful for comments about the last Blob post. It's the graveyard one at blobthing.blogspot.co.uk
Unless it's a .com.

3400 words of an event I don't remember.

15^th December

Grateful to have returned to Manchester.

Grateful for Megabus tickets and odd sights in Salford.

Days of Gratitude - Joy In The Big Performance And The Big Composition

Five more days as the end of the year approaches.

These were excellent days, not to be spoiled by impending anxiety and panic.  The decision half made on one of these days is now fully made and I'm looking forward to indulging myself in the results of that.

Pressing on.  Life is good.  Sometimes autism and mental health combine to make it very difficult indeed.  But it's a wonderful life really and I plan to make it more wonderful in 2017.  This year I've made more discoveries about myself.  Pleasing discoveries.  Next year I will live them as fully as I can on each day.

Is that a brilliant plan?

6^th December

Grateful to see a certain friend for the first time in ages.

Also grateful for Snowdog memories and for them raising a quarter of a million pounds in the auction.

Blob and Winefride watched most of the auction online although Winefride did get bored near the end and wandered off.

7^th December

Grateful to learn friend will be returning very soon.

And grateful to have achieved choir in spite of major anxiety nearly scuppering the journey.

Our first little performance is on Saturday. It'll be great.

8^th December

Grateful for a decision more than half made to join the Lit & Phil and to spend time there next year writing in a pretty distraction free environment.

This may be my new second home, already home to books such as this.

9^th December

Amanda gave me a writing prompt a while back because I asked her for half a sentence. The prompt was this:

"He saw the Christmas lights had been up for months, and he thought to himself"

Grateful that I just finished writing the draft of a story from that prompt and I am shocked at how it managed to top 15,000 words.

Grateful to be writing and for my loose writing plans for next year and the fact that there is no pressure beyond writing because it's good for me, having as much fun with it as possible, and not worrying about where the process will take me.

A year ago I wouldn't have dreamed of writing as much as I've written this year and wouldn't have thought that 15,000 words could flow relatively easily.

I wonder whether they are any good!

10^th December

Grateful for an utterly awesome afternoon at the Bicycle Garden in Fenham.

I was there for a final quick rehearsal before performing with SHE Choir at the event there.

But there were also the joys of eating stunning homemade and garden cooked food, being with excellent people, and getting smoky from the fire.

An added unexpected extra: Making my first ever Christmas wreath. Several of us made a wreath, weaving our rings out of willow and adding all kinds of good things to them.

Very happy times.

Days Of Gratitude - Sexism, Acceptance And A Farewell To Snowdogs

December.  The final month begins.

It's getting much colder.  Except when it isn't.  The last few days were much warmer than average.  On average we can I suppose expect warmer than average days since 2016 is globally the warmest year since records began, beating 2015 which was the warmest year and which beat 2014 which was also the warmest year.  Climate change is real and 2016 saw the election of a man to be President of the USA who has stated that climate change is a Chinese hoax.  There is much to be worried about environmentally - are we all doomed already?

There is also much to be worried about economically and socially.  In the UK there are increasing reports of malnutrition, one million people now are forced to rely on food banks to feed themselves, homelessness is rising and laws to persecute homeless people are being introduced.  Disabled people are losing out under government policy and the rich poor divide continues to increase.

Across the world there are wars - often fought using the weapons sold by the UK and USA - with all the human suffering that war brings, and the civilian suffering and fallout is perhaps greater than ever with so much fighting taking place not on the battle field but in the cities and towns.  The refugee crisis is increasing rather than declining and across Europe refugees face another winter.  I saw a video a couple of days ago about the situation in Greece, posted by a local woman who I've met but don't know.  Maybe next year that will change.  Her Facebook feed has lots about the crisis, about human rights, and about the humanitarian work she is involved with both here and overseas.  Since much of it is publicly shared I'll share it here.  It's under this link.  If you would like to look at the video I mentioned, Ruhi's post is here.

December.  The final month begins.

So it's not the final month is it?  It's only the final months of one particular version of a yearly calendar.

Though there is much to be worried about and much that I'd like to find a way to become more involved with in 2017 there is also much to smile about.  I've been trying to smile and be thankful each day this year.  Sometimes it's been very difficult indeed and my mental health has been wildly changeable.  But I'm glad I've done it.  I'm glad I've kept up this diary.  In another month I think I'll have stopped and will be finding another way to be thankful or to channel positivity and passion.

The final month begins.  You'll see that it's not all roses and sparkles.  But so far the month has been pretty frabjous.

Just wait until the next gratitude post.  You'll see some very joyful frabjousness.  Or should that word be frabjosity?

1^st December

Grateful for time spent with a Sunday Assembly person. Good times.

Grateful to hear Laura Bates who started the Everyday Sexism Project.

Grateful to have so much good in my life and to have written about some of it last night.

Picture is some wise graffiti seen under a bridge. Sometimes it can be easy to forget it and to want to give up.

2^nd December

Grateful for Snowdogs!

The elusive Patchwork Northumberland

I was able to take my soft toy friends to the farewell event. Really good to see the dogs again.

Bye bye dogs. We enjoyed you.

Newcastle and Sunderland Football Club Dogs

And you will raise lots of money for a good cause.

3^rd December

Very hard day.

Grateful for silly computer games.

And grateful to have spent 20p when out, on a new little friend.

This is Merghost. He's a merghost.

4^th December

Grateful for the choir. An extra rehearsal today for a couple of hours.

Great to sing with great people. And fantastic to be totally accepted as a woman within a women only space. It's the first time I've deliberately joined a women's group.

Photo was taken on a dark street afterwards.

5^th December

Grateful that I managed to get to the Sunderland autism drop in for the first time in a year.

Pictures: A sky on the way there, a light tree there, and a hopefully not to be returned to piece of the past on the way back.

Days Of Gratitude - Schoenstatt, Singing, And The Sunday Assembly

November has gone.  December arrived.

Here then are some simple gratitude posts from the end of November.  It's been a good year of trying to post in the Sunday Assembly group every day - which is what the rules say.  But I've come to a decision.  I think.

I will be stopping posting each day in the group.  I'm going to keep it up until the end of December and will then withdraw.  Next year I can find some other way to focus on the joys.  The group is almost nothing now anyway.  130 members.  Sometimes three posts a day.  Sometimes two.  Sometimes just one.  Me.  It's not really a group and it's not a place where seeing other people's joys every day brings you joy.

So I'm going to find something else for 2017.  I have another 24 days to work out some possibilities.  No pressure!  Whatever happens, I will have an entire year of days of gratitude to look back on.  And that's something very precious.

These were the final five days of November.  A period that began in a mental low and saw some improvement.  The last photo reminds me that dark days - such as 26th November - don't last forever.  There will be days of brilliant light again.


26^th November


Grateful to have got through the day.

Grateful to have turned up for something a week early. Rather than a week late.

This odd photo is from the previous Saturday. Never mind! 

27^th November

Grateful for the Sunday Assembly and for meds that enabled me to be there.

Grateful for plaques I haven't read before and for this egg from Jesmond Dene.

28^th November

Grateful to have asked for a writing prompt. The result may not be stunning but I am enjoying it.

Grateful to be able to get to a free event at the Lit & Phil with poems about stuttering.

The only photo of the day - my warthog, who was wishing goodnight to someone.

29^th November

Grateful to have been able to get to the Writers' Cafe and not walk out in a complete state as I did last week.

Grateful to be feeling amazingly better than a week ago.

That photo seems apt.  A pleasing sky for a pleasing state of mind.  It's was taken at the start of October and shows part of the view from the Schoenstatt Shrine on the edge of Bolton.

30^th November

Very grateful to be able to be at the choir after having to miss four sessions in a row for different reasons.

It means a lot to me.

Another out of time photograph, taken on the same day as I visited Schoenstatt.  This is the River Irwell.  A bright sunshine is fitting for a day on which I got back to the choir.

[As I post this on the blog, a week later, I'll be leaving for choir again very soon and enjoyed an extra rehearsal at the weekend.  We have our first ever little performance on Saturday.  Eek!]