I feel a bah humbug moment coming on, with me it's new year rather than Christmas, I pretty much hate new year it seems a very empty kind of tradition to me, just a few days after people have got all sentimental about baby Jesus they want to get drunk and sleep with people they neither know nor like, cynical: moi?? anyway I was pondering this as you do and remembered reading in a recent book a book I read recently that is, that some ancient culture's clever people used to debate all important philosophical questions twice, once sober; once drunk, I suppose some cultures considered inebriation to be getting onto a higher plane of experience, a spiritual plane or something but people now it seems don't believe that they just want to feel different to their normal experience so the question so why are people unhappily sober?? is life so empty that we ... actually I'm boring myself..........zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
anyway, I like Allendale in the snow

had a really great day, one of the best of the year, in Allendale in deep snow on the hills; sun and fresh clean snow, only animal and bird footprints and mine. on the other hand I'm reading a scholarly book given by a friend with dictionary by my side, ( I have the dictionary by my side, not my friend and a dictionary by my side- just to be clear)already had too look up heuristic, solipsistic, aestival and cy.. what was it? cynosural, and another: what woz it??? yes: sidereal, not to mention quotes in Latin and Greek sans translation! I'm going to have to take it slowly..........

been trying a little op art, canny difficult to get nice clean lines, especially if the wife starts chopping vegetables at the same table you are painting on.

the birds aren't op art, I think they are starlings