Grains Of Golden Sand

So, it appears I haven't posted here since 2012. I've been busy alright, leave me alone. So much has happened in the intervening years, but of course you wouldn't really be interested so I shall refrain from boring you. Why am I posting you will be asking yourself by now, well, New Year's Eve always fills me with a multitude, a myriad, a veritable multiplicity of emotions. It is the embodiment of time, an arbitrary place holder in the fabric of modern society, the one day that we are all made to sit up and take notice of the passing of our lives and the loss of another year in our tenure of this world. We think of the New Year's Eves past and how quickly the 365 days (or 366 in the case of the coming year) will pass, what we should achieve and what we will probably fail to achieve during those days. It reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe's poem (mentioned elsewhere on this blog) 'A Dream Within A Dream' in which the great man laments the loss of time, the swiftness of its passing and the futility of our attempts to arrest it:

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?

So 2015 draws close as I write these words in the heat of another Australian NYE, my 21st in this, my adopted country. I have already began to partake in my celebratory (or is that self-commiseratory) glass of single malt and I hope to be unconscious at the hour the unstoppable juggernaut of the new year finally arrives, drawing us all closer to that pitiless wave.