Happy New Leaf

Hello! It’s been a while, I know – there’s a year-shaped hole in this blog. At first it was unintentional: I was busy with other creative pursuits, but as 2020 wore on, beginning with fires then floods in Australia, and followed by a global plague and an interminable (or seven months to be exact) lockdown in Melbourne, I came to realise that 2020 was a year that deserved to be finished as quickly as possible and cast post-haste into oblivion. (If only everyone’s post had been haste this year, but I digress!)  So here we are, between my last post of 1 January 2020 and today’s post of 1 January 2021 lies … a blank, and it shall remain that way.

Today I strolled in the Botanic Gardens with one of my sisters, wearing a 1930s dress, parasol and handbag, and a great pair of modern Ray Bans that I bought recently for a song in a thrift store. As we passed this enormous-leafed tree, I asked my sister to photograph me alongside it, as an apt metaphor of New Year’s Day.

As you have no doubt already countless times read or heard elsewhere, may I suggest we now draw the curtain on that horrible year-that-has-passed and look forward – hopefully – to a brighter and healthier 2021. Though we might not be quite out of the woods yet, we can at least turn over a new leaf.