From a Mouse
24th December 2025
I started this blog to leave a record of my research into our family tree for my descendants. It was going well for the first couple of years and then 2025 arrived.
It was supposed to be a year of new years resolutions including making progress with the blog and revising my use of social media to elimate the influence of the massive 'enshittification' of the web by big corporations and on a more personal level I was going to try to get fitter and healthier.
But as the great Scottish poet Robbie Burns said-
"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley"
Three months into the year my "schemes" went not only "awry" but absolutely derailed themselves and my whole life for half the year.
After an unexpected reaction to a simple medication followed by some long awaited dental surgery that didn't go as I had planned I was plunged into an abyss of ill health and depression from which it took all the efforts of my doctor and a therapist to extract me.
Now that I am feeling "back to normal" (well as normal as I've ever been) I have spent the last couple of months reflecting on what the year taught me and what I can do to protect myself from that kind of experience in the future. On the health and fitness level I have retuned to walking on my treadmill for 20 minutes 3 times a week (after barely being able to manage 5 minutes at first). This is something I was doing in the past but gave up in 2020 when my mother died and I had never gone back to it. I am also monitoring my weight, without being too obsessive, so that I don't regain the excess weight I lost as a result of the battle with my teeth. I have cleaned out my wardrobe and found that I have quite a few clothes that I haven't been able to wear for a while but which now fit comfortably again.
On the philosiphical level I have begun to take an interest in this web site again and this post is the first attempt at regenerating the self expression I was starting to cultivate before things went wrong. I also intend to add a Craft section to post about my return to knitting which is a hobby I had put aside in the past with just the vague intention of doing more when I retired. I have been retired for almost 10 years and apart from one failed attempt to interest myself in crochet, my bits of yarn and knitting needles had languished in a cupboard until I needed something to focus my attention on in order to distract myself from my own unhappy thoughts.
So although Burns concluded that unlike the Mouse, who is only concerned with the present moment, humanity is cursed with awareness of past and future to worry about. I am resolving to focus myself on living one day at a time, just like the "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie" that I am.
