1. The pots and pans peal sonorously in the ceramic sink.

2. The end of the year & decade encourages me to reflect, to plan. A number of friends are doing “101 goals in 1001 days” but I think that’s too many and too long for me – I’d either end up listing things I didn’t really want to do or lose momentum and fall short. I decide to come up with 10 for 2010 instead.

3. We don’t have TV (no one thinks of the radio) and all our watches & phones are out of sync so there is no countdown to midnight. When we guess it’s about the right time, we exchange ‘happy new year’s and when I open the balcony door, the cacophony of bangs & whoops tells us we’re about right. I step out onto the balcony alone but Dathan & Olli soon join me. While fireworks boom and Chinese lanterns rise in the distance, we discuss our thoughts on the overriding themes of recent decades*, Jordan Catalano & trench warfare/the Somme. The great silver moon watches us throughout.

* Negatively, I agree with the Hadley Freeman article in the Guardian about the Noughties (oh, how I hate that word) being a decade defined by fakery – fake reality (such as reality TV), fake reasons for going to war, fake science and of course, a fake election to start with – but more positively, I think it’s been a decade of reversing the planet (and people) abuse of the previous decades. It obviously started well before 2000 but it’s gone mainstream this decade – more people care about finding ethical and environmentally-friendly alternatives now than they did in the past. There is still a long way to go of course.