Mid-January. Two weeks until payday, but it feels like it should’ve been last Friday. Still dark when I get up and when I get out of work. It’s a cliché, but it’s true, the January Blues exist.

It’s been alleviated a bit since we started planning a trip to Brussels and Amsterdam for the end of Feb; nothing like a holiday to cheer you up. Not to mention the fact that, at the end of the day, I’m pretty fortunate and don’t really have much to gripe about at the moment.

Especially when I think of some of my friends and family – it seems like the shit’s been hitting the fan for a lot of people I know. A close friend was made redundant this week, pretty much out of the blue. Another friend of ours just had a miscarriage. A colleague’s father passed away just before Christmas. My sister had a car accident a couple of weeks back (she’s OK, but her job relies on her being mobile). A couple of other family members are unwell – not life threateningly, but enough to effect their quality of life. My thoughts are with them all.

Then there’s the omnipresent terrorist threat that the media and the government seem to delight in reminding us about every day. We’ve lived through this sort of thing before. We know something might happen. We know we’ve got to be on the lookout. What else are we supposed to do about it?

Oh, I suppose that we could go to war. The whole Iraq situation leaves me with a bad feeling in my guts and a funny taste in my mouth. I don’t want to see Saddam waving nukes around any more than any other sane person, but I can’t help feel cynical about the whole damn thing. And I can’t help feeling that a war in Iraq is going to make things worse, not better, in terms of the threat of more terrorist attacks.

I suppose that this is one reason to live for the day, and not to wish life away. We might well be at war by the time January rolls to a close, and then who knows what’s going to happen.

Peace and love, people