Goodbye 2017. Don't ring us, we'll ring you

So how was it for you? 2017 I mean! For me it was not a vintage year. My Dad died in May and his sister, my Auntie Hazel, died on Christmas Day. My friend Richard has been in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for most of the second half of the year. He was rushed in by ambulance in early July and on his times out of hospital, David and I have been his carers. Much of what I planned for the second half of 2017 therefore simply didn't happen. And much of what I planned for the first half of the year was sacrificed to that bloody general election campaign with its worrying return to two party politics. This was meant to be the year off from elections in Gateshead. It turned out to be nothing of the sort. 

Meanwhile Brexit is all-consuming and Trump reveals his innermost thoughts on Twitter (easily done given the restriction of 140 characters on tweets.) Politics has been something like a bad dream in 2017 from which it has been impossible to wake up.

Meanwhile, on the self-sufficiency side, my beautiful billy goat Spotless died suddenly in April. Spot, one of our nanny goats, rejected one of her two babies and we ended up hand raising a kid during the election campaign. Sadly, he died suddenly in June after winning lots of fans at the Whinnies Community Garden where he lived. In January, we found all our bees had died (fortunately we have since been able to replace them but we have therefore had no honey production this year).

So 2017, thank you and goodbye. In 2018, things can only get better. Now, where have I heard that before!?