Tag Archives: New Year

The Recovering Year

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I started 2024 in a hotel room in Italy in a full-leg brace, unable to walk. I am ending it in a hotel room in Colorado, still unable to ski and with an aching arm due to what I think may be tennis elbow. In between, I have swum 5 kilometers very slowly, spent more time in hospital than I really wanted, failed to make significant progress with my book projects and lost the ability to sleep through the night.

So no, 2024 has not been an easy year. Much of it has felt wildly out of balance with long periods when I felt like the Red Queen in Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, running very fast to remain in one place offset by some blissful periods of doing very little other than reading Georgette Heyer novels. But it has been a year of recovery. This recovery has been physical. I am now back on both feet and even running again. It has taken a lot of physiotherapy on my ham string to get me there, with a lot more in prospect as I am now due to have surgery to repair my ACL in the spring.

But there have been other things that I have recovered as well this year. One of them, thanks in part to those period of reading Heyer (among others), is my enjoyment of reading for its own sake. I never fully lost this, but this year I recovered the ability to read for pleasure without feeling guilty about all the other things I could or should be doing with the time. As the year has progressed, I have found more time for reading outside of holiday periods. This has been a gift, helping me to restore some of that balance that I have lost over the past few years.

The other thing I have recovered, somewhat to my surprise, is my desire to write. Granted, I have done less writing for the books than I might have hoped. But in the final third of the year I wrote 60,000 words of lectures, an intense and oddly energizing project, particularly in retrospect. I wrote, and started to rewrite a book proposal, and wrote and submitted an ultimately unsuccessful fellowship application. Combined with the reviews I have been writing for this site (which I will post in the new year), I have started to feel as if I have found my voice again after a prolonged period of not being sure if I had anything to say, if I had the ability to say it, or if anyone would listen if I did.

Those doubts do still assail me, particularly at 2 am and in relation to the big book project. The process of recovery is not complete, any more than the process of recovery for my knee is. It may never be, fully, but here, at the end of 2024, it does feel at least that I can see the direction I need to head. The current level of imbalance is unsustainable, just as the continuing instability of my knee is for the sort of life I want to live. There will have to be some big changes in the coming year to ensure that my recovery, physical and psychological, continues. These still feel a bit tentative. I am waiting for the exact date of my surgery and my other plans will have to wait until after that, probably for the second half of the year. But changes there will be in 2025, that I can promise.

So here is to the recovered year just gone and a year of change and progress to come. Wishing you and yours all health and happiness for whatever the new year may bring.

Accountability

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Having noted in my last post that I ended 2023 with a number of unfinish projects, I thought I would start the new year listing those that I hope to make progress with if not actually complete over the coming year. This is not a resolution (I’m possibly a bit late for that on Epiphany), but rather a hope to the point of intention.

Writing:

  1. Janaury/February: Two book reviews. I’ve read both books and have a good sense of what I want to say, but I have negotiated a bit more time for both of these as I know that I will get very little writing done once marking and postgraduate studentship applications come in in a couple of weeks.
  2. April: Two conference presentations.
    • Discussant on a panel in military welfare history as a sub-field. My contribution will be considering intersections with histories of disability and gender.
    • ‘The Playboy, the Father, the Scholar and the Brute: Ambridge Masculinities in Historical Perspective’ for the 2024 Academic Archers conference. I am very excited about this one, and can’t wait to start writing this properly. It has been a couple of years since I last attended an AA conference, which are some of the most fun out there.
  3. The big one: The book. This will definitely not get finished this year, but the goal is to end the year with at least a couple of full chapters in place, and possibly even an agent for it.
  4. And the new project: One of the books I’ve been reading for review has inspired me to think again about the status of ambulance drivers and non-combattant care-givers (or not). I think there may be a journal article in this, drawing together some of the material that I was only able to mention in passing in An Equal Burden.

Knitting:

  1. The cardigan that I started as a lockdown project. I have finally built up the courage to steek it (successfully, I think), but now have to complete the button bands and grafting. This may require another ball of wool from the supplier.
  2. Three family sweaters. Every year for Christmas I give my husband and two children the wool for a new sweater, which I then knit for them. This year I began my husband’s before Christmas, intending it for his birthday, after last year’s effort ended up far too tight in the arms and chest due to a miscalculation. However, as I have chosen an extremely complicated fair isle pattern, it is taking considerably longer than anticipated. Thankfully, the children’s sweaters should be more straight forward, so I may actually complete these before the weather gets too warm to wear them this year.
  3. And the new project: Today’s clearout of the bathroom cupboards in advance of the builders arriving tomorrow disclosed the sad fact that the baby blanket my mother made when my son was born had fallen victim moths. So I spent an hour today unravelling it, ending up with approximately six 50g balls of lovely, soft DK wool which, for sentimental reasons, I would like to make into something new. I’m not sure what yet, but all suggestions will be gratefully accepted.

Quilting:

  1. Autumnal quilt. My first full-sized bed quilt which I am very, very slowly hand quilting. Not one that I can see getting completed this year, but I would like to make more progress on it than I have done in the past 12 months.
  2. Alice’s Wonderland quilt: A Block of the Month project from Alice Caroline which I started in January 2022. All that remains is to attach the final four borders, after which I will take it to be long-arm quilted at my local quilt store. It is intended as a gift and I am not yet confident enough at hand quilting to take this aspect on (nor to do I have the time if it is to go to its recipient – currently age 4 – before they leave home for university).
  3. And the new project: Because I clearly can’t resist the siren call of the new project, I have signed up for another Alice Caroline BoM project this year. Hopefully this one will be a little bit quicker, now that I am more confident of my technique.

In the kitchen and the garden:

These are less unfinished projects from last year than annual events which come around every year. Nonetheless, they fall under the heading of projects, and very enjoyable ones, too.

  1. Marmalade. The making of this year’s batch will be made more interesting by my current temporary impairment relating to my knee injury, which requires brace and crutches and means I am only partially mobile.
  2. Germination: We still don’t have a greenhouse (a very long-term unfinished project), so some time in the next few months the window sills will start to play host to pots of seeds in anticipation of one of the summer’s main garden projects, the veg patch.
  3. The front bed: Yet another project that is now several years old. Having removed a hugely overgrown berberis, I now need to finish digging out all the stones to replant with a callicarpa and bulbs. This one, however, will have to wait until the weather improves.
  4. And the new project: For Christmas, my husband asked for and received a cookbook about plant-based baking. I may have rashly agreed to try making plant-based cinnamon rolls at some point…

As I say, I won’t complete all of these projects, but I hope to finish some and at least make progress with the rest. Whatever else it turns out to be, 2024 looks to be a busy year.

The breaking year

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This end-of-year reflection was originally going to be titled ‘The Half-finished Year’, a reference not only to my ever-expanding folder of started but unfinished blog posts and the 2500 words of my next book, but also the two sweaters and three quilts that I am currently working on, as well as the unpainted front hallway and bathtub sitting in the living room that await attention when I get home. But, as I sit in a hotel room in Italy with my leg in a brace while the rest of my family is out skiing, I have come to realise that the reason that this year has been shaped so profoundly by the unfinished is because of the time that ill health has taken from me.

The year started with a minor but mortifying facial disfigurement in the form of a failed dental implant. It is ending in a broken ACL, the aforementioned brace, and uncertainty about how long recovery will take and what it will mean for all the activities and projects I have planned so far for the coming year. In between came multiple trips to the dentist, the doctor and the hospital, diagnosis of three conditions, two chronic, one temporary, the consequent prescriptions (including two attempts for the chronic conditions which resulted in distressing and painful side effects) and more blood tests than I would wish on my worst enemy.

Through all of this, I have not taken time off of work. I have continued my roles as wife and monther and have kept reassuring friends and family that I am fine, or at least managing. And in many ways I am lucky. The dental work has provided me with a successful prosthetic for the lost tooth. The three of the four medications I am taking are preventative rather than therapeutic. None of the conditions I suffer are life threatening. And while my current physical impairment is disabling, it is also temporary, even if rehabilitation is going to be counted in months at minimum, not weeks as I might wish. As someone who both works in the fields of disability and medical history, and has lived through the terminal illnesses of both parents, I know how fortunate I am that my various forms of ill health are identifiable, relatively painless and highly treatable, and that I live in a country and society where I have ready access to the care and treatment I need, as well as a support network of family and friends.

But while resilience may be an admirable quality in some ways, not least in providing a sense of continuity which is itself therapeutic, it cannot be a permanent state of being, as any old rubber band will show. Something, somewhere had to give in this year that has done its best to break me, physically and psychologically. It may not have succeeded entirely, but it does seem to have robbed me of significant amounts of time and, with it, my ability to complete projects, particularly those related to writing.

Which is not to say that this hasn’t been a year of progress in some ways. Indeed, I am managing, with this post, to publish more than one post for this blog this year, an improvement on my output for 2022. I now have a very clear idea of both the shape and content of my next book, although the form will require the sort of concentrated writing time that I definitely haven’t had this year and probably won’t in the coming year. I will even have new publications in the new year, in the form of a book chapter which fell victim to Covid delays and at least one book review. And I have managed to steek a cardigan for the first time, a terrifying technique in knitting that involves taking scissors to a piece of work knitted in the round to create an opening.

These achievements, small as they are, remind me that, unlike an old rubber band, I may be damaged but I am not yet broken. But, as I enter the new year in a damaged state, I do so with the knowledge that I cannot simply bounce back to a state of full productivity, as much as I might wish to do so. I need time and space both to heal what has broken this year and, when I am strong enough, to give my many unfinished projects the attention they deserve. So I will start this new year not with resolutions but with the hope that I will be able to find or make the time and space for convalescence and recuperation and with them the ability and courage complete some, if not all, of my half-finished projects.

I wish you all a healthy, contented and hope-fulfilled new year.

A resolution

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Every year since 2013 I have posted a reflective blog post at some point between Christmas and New Year. I posted throughout my chidren’s early childhoods, when Christmastime was a welter of preparation and lack of sleep. I posted through my parents’ illness and in the wake of their deaths. I posted the year I caught a stomach bug and spent much of the holiday feeling extremely sorry for myself.

But not last year. Somehow, there didn’t seem much to say last year, after a year of anxiety and restrictions, with yet another lockdown (and its attendant home-schooling-while-full-time-teaching-on-line stresses) on the horizon. And that failure to post seems to have set the tone for this past year, a year in which I have failed to write.

I don’t mean that entirely literally. I have written syllabi, reports, and many, many comments on students’ work. I have drafted an article (currently under review following a revise-and-resubmit) and wrote three new talks on my research. I even submitted a short story to a competition over the summer (it didn’t get long-listed, so no feedback). And yet it has still been a year when I have felt blocked in my writing, when nothing has flowed, when I have struggled to find my voice on the page.

It is not just that I have not posted on this blog since July 2020. Having entered the pandemic with ideas for three major pieces of writing, all of them have stalled. The proposal for the monograph based on the research from Men, Women and Care remains unwritten. I have done nothing about the trade history beyond speaking to a couple of possible literary agents. And the novel I started so blithely remains stubbornly stuck at 25,000 words.

There are, of course, good, explicable reasons for this lack of writing productivity. The above-mentioned home-schooling-plus-on-line-teaching absorbed much of the start of the year. The hybrid return to campus in the autumn, along with the resumption of my children’s extra-curricular schedules (choir, rugby, drama, riding) brought its own set of stresses and challenges. As for the summer … I’m not actually sure what happened to the summer this year. Whatever it was did not involve putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

Writing in a pandemic is hard, and I am trying my hardest to be kind to myself and not to berate myself over the lack of progress. But the fact is that reflecting on this writing block makes me feel sad and anxious in a way that is different from the sadness and anxiety I have felt (and often felt acutely) in past years.

I need to write. I need get the ideas in my head on paper (or a screen). I need to make mistakes, cross things out, find the perfect phrase, delete whole paragraphs and then rewrite them. And I have plenty to write. In addition to the monograph, trade history and novel, there is a blog post on the White Feather campaign I want to write, an article with a deadline next month and the character I have left in limbo in an incomplete AO3 story. Those three new talks should, I hope, form the basis of monograph chapters and there is a call for papers for an edited collection which could give me scope for exploring a key angle to emerge from Men, Women and Care.

So, for the first time in many years I am making a specific New Year’s resolution, one which I intend to hold myself accountable for. Every day for the next 365 days, I will write for a minimum of half an hour. It doesn’t matter what it is – a blog post, fiction, a draft chapter, a proposal. It doesn’t matter when in the day it is, although I do know I write best in the mornings. It doesn’t matter if I am working that day or on holiday, at home or traveling (as I hope to be doing come the spring). For half an hour every day I will write in the hope of getting my writing muscles working again, just as I have this past year sought to get my running muscles working again.

So there is the marker I am placing in 2022. Given the current state of the world, I have no confidence in making any predictions for what the new year may bring, but I will enter it with some hope that there will, at least, be a few more posts on this blog than last year, and maybe even a draft book (or two) by its end. I can but hope.

So I will close this piece of end-of-the-year writing by wishing you all a hopeful, health and happy new year.

A harder year

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Three years ago, I posted an end-of-year reflection entitled ‘A Hard Year’. That year was, indeed, a hard year, as were the two years that came after, filled as they were with the stresses of family illnesses and the labour of writing my book and getting a large project off the ground. None of these, however, can bear comparison with this year, a year that will forever be marked by the terrifying speed with which my mother’s cancer accelerated, the intensity of helping care for her in the final month of her life and the grief induced by her death and the emotional aftermath of commemorating her and clearing her apartment, the home I grew up in, of a lifetime of objects and memories. Nothing could prepare me for facing how hard this would be; that I have survived this year with my marriage intact, my children alive and thriving and my relationships with my family and friends (particularly my two wonderful siblings) more or less intact is a source of wonder and amazement.

Because this year was never solely about loss, grief and mourning. There has been a great deal of happiness, joy, even plain old contentment, from my brother’s wedding through hot summer days spent clearing the garden to one of the happiest Christmas Days I have had in several years. Moving to a house that I grow to love more with each day (in spite of the daunting amount of work that needs doing to it) in a community that has been immensely welcoming has been the biggest source of happiness, even if it has made getting to and from work considerably more complicated.

You may have noticed by now that all of the things I have mentioned as shaping and defining my year have been those associated with my private, rather than my professional life, and this isn’t only because my professional life has increasingly been circumscribed by commuting and the incompetence of Northern Rail. Professionally, this has felt very much like a holding year, albeit one in which I published an article and completed the editing, copy-editing and other production matter on my book. I have worked on various bits of writing, presented at a couple of conferences, explored the possibilities of future intellectual enquiry, manage the project I am currently engaged on. But any accomplishments of the year have been acheived by those with whom it is my pleasure and privilege to work – students completing milestones in their research, colleagues completing books, my post-doc organising a successful and rightfully praised conference as part of Men, Women and Care project.

This has felt okay, even necessary – a moment taken to recalibrate at the end of one venture, the middle of another and the very faint possibility of the beginning of a third. It will provide, I hope, the basis of consolidating the gains made and putting into practice ideas which have been given some time to germinate, particularly around the direction of the International Society for First World War Studies. But if it has meant that my personal life has been the most dominant force in shaping my memories of this year, this professional breath has also provided the space to make some unexpected connections between intense personal experiences and my professional historical understanding.

As I wrote previously, caring for my mother allowed me to make a more profound connection, both intellectual and emotional, with the historical work of caring undertaken historically by women in the home, the sort of care which is going to be the subject of my next book. But, since my son has started singing in a church choir a half hour drive from our home, requiring me to act as a ferrying service, I have found myself attending church regularly. While this hasn’t altered my personal belief or relationship to faith, it has given me time to reflect, sitting under the regimental monument listing all the great engagements of the First World War, on the place of faith and worship in the lives of those I study. The routine and rhythm of the cycle of services, the music created by voice and organ, the ceremony and ceremonial may not have brought me closer to God, but may have brought me closer to my historical subjects in whose lives faith played so much greater a regular part than it does in British society today. It is something I am struggling to articulate, although I hope to do so in a blog on Sarah Phelps’s adaptation of The ABC Murders for BBC1 in the next couple of weeks.

There will be other blog posts, too, in the new year, as well as other work to be done, not least the continued population of the Men, Women and Care database, which is already throwing up interesting material. There will be stresses and strains (other family illnesses are ongoing and my son will be applying for secondary school places come the autumn). And there will be much to celebrate, both professionally and personally. The book’s official release date is 7th February, to be followed in short order by the expected arrival of two new babies in the family.  There is the house to work on, friendships to nurture, ideas to pursue.  It has been another hard year, the hardest yet, and one that I will never forget. But there is a new year to come with all its fears and promises.  May yours be filled with more of the latter than the former.

Happy New Year.

The unfinished year

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So as is traditional (at least for the past two years), it is time for me to reflect on the past year and offer a few hopes for the coming one.  Last year I reflected on a hard year in 2015 and hoped for an easier one in 2016.  I doubt many people would identify this past year as such, and the political and international situation looks bleaker than it did 12 months ago.  But at a personal level, this has been a year that, even if not noticeably easy, then at least an improvement on the previous one.  Both my parents are still ill and neither will ever rid themselves of their respective conditions, but somehow we have come to some sort of accommodation that makes the day-to-day manageable, most days.  This is life, not crisis. Similarly, the managerial work that felt so frightening two years ago has become less overwhelming as I have become more familiar with it.  It is still labour that I am less secure with than, say, writing a book, but I am slowly discovering my own capability for this role, which makes things easier.

And there have been some triumphs. My husband got himself a new job, which he will take up in a couple of months.  This brings many positives and a few potential problems, but it is definitely a step in the direction that he wants to go.  My daughter started on the great intellectual adventure that is formal schooling. In the column marked ‘unadulterated joy’, my sister got married and my brother introduced us to his new partner. The Men, Women and Care project is properly off the ground (including its very own website and blog!) and definitely going places, places which offer their own challenges but are hugely exciting.  The team I have recruited is, so far, living up to their promise and doing interesting and creative work.  There have been a few (small) funding successes, to balance out the inevitable failures.  And, above all, I finally got my book proposal off to a publisher and it has been accepted!

Which is why this year, more than most, feels unfinished.  So much of the positive has not be the culmination or completion of hard work, whether personal or professional, but baby steps along the journey.  So I will enter the new year with papers to write, books to read, a major project to work on, including pursuing new theoretical and methodological angles which I hadn’t considered before this year, a few smaller projects (including two conferences) to organise, and, of course, a book to complete.  On the domestic front, there are still carpets to be laid, decisions to be made about renovations, and the tantalising potential of a house move that has been under discussion for the past year. The children continue to grow, physically, emotionally and mentally, challenging me as a parent as they do so.

There is a lot to do, but I will go into the new year with some lessons learned – about my own ability to recover from the personal paralysis induced by major political crises, about the importance of flexibility and my own capacity to accommodate the unexpected, about how much I can do, how much I rely on others to lend a hand or ear – and just how many wonderful friends and colleagues I have who do just that.  Some things, I hope, will come to fruition in 2017.  Others will carry on carrying on.  Whatever the new year brings, however, I am approaching it, once again, in hope and more energy than last year.

Finally, it has been a year when I have turned more than usual to poetry as a source of consolation, primarily Auden and Frost, who I can probably say with some confidence are my favourite poets.  So I will leave you with a poem appropriate for this point in the year, as the temperatures tumble and cover the world in frost crystals, if not necessarily snow, making my first run after a 5-month hiatus due to planter faciitis, a thing of sparkling wonder and promise.  It is, as it happens, the first poem I was ever conscious of memorising as a child.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and snowy lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, 1922

Wish you and yours a year of promises kept and fulfilled and miles travelled safely, however near or far the ultimate destination. Happy New Year.

Taking stock

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It is the last day the university is open before Christmas.  The heating is off in my office, as is the light in the hallway.  In fact, I think I am the only person left working on this floor.  So what better time to take a moment to look back and take stock of this incredibly hectic year.

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I had hoped to be doing this from the perspective of a clear desk, with all major projects completed, at least until the new year. Sadly, this is not to be.  I am preparing to place the fifth draft of an article which still needs a conclusion, a few more supporting quotations and a couple of hours of formatting footnotes before I can send it to the editor in my bag to take home with me.  Alongside that are a 350-page book and 48-page grant application, both of which I need to (re)familiarize myself with in preparation for two interviews early in the new year.  Oh, and then there is the grant application I need to redraft with the goal of resubmitting in early February. This will be the sixth time I have submitted this project for consideration by a funding body or grant-awarding committee.

So there is quite a lot of work still to do over the next two weeks, between the turkey and the Christmas cake and the two excited small children for whom Christmas is nothing but magic, a fact that makes it hard, sometimes, to remember just how much I have achieved over the past year.  But for all the lack of a nice tidy ending, there are definite signs of progress, not least the lovely folder that tops my document list bearing the working title of the book I will be writing next year.  The joy of the folder lies not just in its existence, but also in the fact that it contains two documents, a draft proposal and a draft introduction.  Baby steps perhaps, but concrete evidence nonetheless that this book is actually happening.  In the past 12 months it has gone from a vague promise to myself and my funding body to a clear outline and argument with a story to tell and a point to make.

And there are other concrete achievements.  The article I have been working on for the last few weeks may be tantalizingly unfinished, but the one I was working on this time last year is not only completed but has also been accepted for publication next year, marking the culmination of a project that had its inception nearly three years ago.  Slightly more abstractly, the piles of marking and course documentation, waiting to be filed following the completion of exams and second marking next month, bear witness to the time I have committed to teaching this year, time which has not only boosted both my CV and my confidence in possibly my least favourite aspect of the academic discipline, but also laid the groundwork for my forthcoming application to the Higher Education Academy for professional validation.

And then there are the abstract developments, such as the discovery that, despite two television appearances and a number of radio interviews, I am probably not cut out to be a full scale media don or public intellectual.  As much as I have enjoyed my engagement with broadcast media, particularly my interactions with the BBC as a New Generation Thinkers finalist and a World War One at Home adviser, I suspect I will always prefer blogging, whether on here or for collaborative blogs, as a form of public engagement.  Which brings me to my greatest regret of the year, the fact I have not been able to commit more time to this blog.  Too many subjects have slipped away from me as I have struggled to manage my priorities and keep some semblance of a work-life balance; too many comments have been made too late and in too much of a hurry.  I make no rash promises for doing better next year, but absence has made the heart grow fonder in this case, making me realize how important the process of blogging has become to working through my ideas.  With a little luck and slightly better management, I hope to be able to properly blog the progress of my book next year, as it goes from draft outline to completed manuscript.

Next year will, of course, be different.  As a colleague and fellow First World War historian has pointed out to me, 2014 has been a particularly hectic one for those of us who study the subject.  There have been more opportunities for undertaking innovative research and engaging with interested audiences than any of us could possibly take complete advantage of. Highlights for me have included the wealth of interesting academic conferences to choose from, including the wonderful War: An Emotional History which continues to inspire me and shape my approach to my work; the opportunity to help put together and teach a Massive Open Online Course, not something I could ever have anticipated or which I altogether enjoyed but which taught me a great deal; and the opportunity to engage with a range of interesting and inspiring artistic projects that have, once again, raised questions of the roles of historic and artistic interpretation in the process of commemoration. Low points include some frustratingly bad television, pointless and clichéd debates which failed to make full use of the real depth of historical knowledge about the war, both nationally and transnationally, that exists in Britain today, and the mind-numbing boredom that overwhelms me every time I contemplate the pointless unending discussions of the Christmas Truce which appear to have overwhelmed all else in the past weeks.  I think the high points more than balance out the low; at the very least they give me hope that there will be interesting discussions to be had in the future as we continue the centenary commemorations.

So there we have it, quite a lot of good, a bit of bad, a smattering of seriously ugly.  A year in which, however slowly, progress has been made and one in which much more has been promised but not yet achieved.  I enter the final week of the old year with a sense of incompletion but also of hope, a hope which I will desperately cling to as I face 2015 from a point of deep uncertainty and insecurity.  At present my current contract is due to come to an end in May.  I do have a very real chance of securing more funding after that (the interviews and grant applications I mentioned), although after over a year of pursuing them I am reaching exhaustion point.  I have spent so much of this year saying that I should know, one way or the other what would be happening to me by the end of the year.  It is not to be.  It will not, in my case, all be over by Christmas.  But for all that, there is hope of a positive resolution, something that would mean both immense personal achievement for me and security for my family.  So I will leave you with that sense of hope, to temper the anticipation of the hard work that will be needed if I am to have any chance of accomplishing the desired outcome.

Merry Christmas. And a hopeful, healthy, happy New Year to you all.