CHOICES

It seems to me that life is mostly about choices and learning to live with them and realising that you can't really complain about how things are when the way things are in your life is mostly due to those choices you have made.

That's a convoluted way of saying something very simple, but, bizarrely, it does make perfect sense, both grammatically and philosophically, and even geographically, if you're so inclined.

Or is that mathematically...?

No matter... I'm wandering off the point a little here.

On the whole, unless other people have chosen not to spend time with us, or society has chosen to put us into a place full of other people we've never previously met, we choose the people we want to spend our lives and times with, even if he prisons we find ourselves in are the ones of our own making.

Also, if we find that some of the days of our lives seem dull or mundane, well, perhaps everybody else's are too, and in much the same proportion, but not necessarily at the same time.

Which is why the grass can always seem greener, or your own life, and what it has become, can seem lonely, bereft or tragic at a time when all anyone else seems to be able to tell you is what a fabulous time they are having.

Well, rest assured, all you tragic souls who wash up on the shores of Lesser Blogfordshire from time to time; There'll be none of that sort of nonsense in these parts. If life's choosing to give us lemons around here, you know that you'll just end up with a recycling bag full of rotting lemons.

Most of us are supposed to be living lives of quiet desperation anyway, I just took a long time to realise that I'd become the living, physical embodiment of it.

If you knew what my life has become, people, you'd probably weep... if you could bring yourselves to actually care.

Sorry, in my head, when I sat down to start writing this, my arguments here made a lot more sense that they seem to do now.

There are, of course, other, less important choices that life will give you - Whether to visit Twin Peaks or Bedford Falls for Christmas; Whether a Roger Moore film is a more entertaining choice than a Daniel Craig one; Whether, after having missed the last posting dates before you even sat down to write any Christmas Cards, you should still bother sitting down and writing any.

I'm not sure I know the answer to any of these questions, although certainly the season came crashing into our lives far, far more unexpectedly than I could possibly have imagined so that those cards never got written, but I think that it was a wise choice (for me at least), in the end, to choose "Twin Peaks" over Bedford Falls this year, no matter how terrifying a place both of them can appear in their own sweet ways.

Somehow I felt as if I fitted right in.