A lot of people have been posting those Facebook-generated summaries of their year. Ive enjoyed reading them. However, when I looked at what Facebook had cooked for me I thought it wasnt up to scratch. The system evidently gets confused by how I use photos and posts. So, instead, I decided to write my own brief account of 2014... The year began with the publication of the first volume of Pressing Matters ... the memoir about so many amazing years in the past. In February I was at the Science Museum to witness Gendered Intelligence launch their part of the Who am I? exhibition and say a few words to the crowd. Then, in March, my lovely daughter presented a second gorgeous grandchild, Daisy, who promptly grabbed all the other superlative adjectives available in the rest of my years posts. Did I mention that Daisy is lovely? In early May I finally met the long lost cousin who I had tracked down the previous autumn. We met in suitably lovely surroundings on the first May Bank Holiday weekend with 60 years worth of missed family history to try and figure out. Later that month I also did another increasingly rare LGBT public appearance, sitting on a Question Time panel organised by Brighton and Hove Council. In June I was busy preparing for the departure of one set of tenants and the arrival of a new set and then, come July, I finally dissolved the company that had kept me in work for the last dozen years ... more or less the final step in a retirement that began in the Spring of 2013. Over the summer I spent a lot of time in the garden but also managed to become a patron of the Proud2Be campaign and, later, LGBT Youth. My elder grandchild Harvey (did I mention hes gorgeous too?) left nursery school and prepared to enter proper schooling. Then, as autumn drew in, I judged the IoS Rainbow List for the second year in a row and gave a short talk at the Trans Youth Conference in Manchester. Those last few months had also been spent steadily researching and writing the second volume of Pressing Matters, with samples of each days new work posted on Facebook for people to savour. In between all that I also read 55 books, including the entire works of two amazing female detective authors: Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton. And thats more or less it. The year feels bracketed by publishing the two books at the start and end and the best bits were all about family ... which is only right and proper. Thank you for sharing the year with me. Christine x
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 10:50:45 +0000