'I'm a Big Mac'

Well, it's 2025. Amazing how the time flies. It seems not so long ago that we were at the turning of the millennium, and that seemed supernaturally futuristic -- and now we're a quarter-century past it! "2001: A Space Odyssey" is now a fictional story about the distant past rather than a cautionary tale of a dystopian future.

That sunrise is actually from yesterday, so it's the last sunrise of 2024. Where I am, the sun hasn't even come up yet in 2025.

Dave had his surgical staples out yesterday, as expected. He said it was a painless process -- he literally felt nothing. Apparently the doctors use a medical version of an office staple remover to extract them. They say his incisions look good and he is recovering well. Here's hoping for a surgery-free 2025!

While he was doing that, I took the opportunity for a long photo walk, retracing some of the route our Uber took through London when we went to Whitstable. We passed some intriguing places and I wanted a better look, so I took a bus to Archway and walked south on Holloway Road all the way to Balls Pond Road near Dalston -- about three miles. You will no doubt see some of the pictures in coming days.

Then I took the overground back to my neck of the woods, and got out at Hampstead Heath, intending to walk through Belsize Park for photos of some things I saw from the bus window. A heavyset older woman and a teenage boy sat across from me on the train having a very strange conversation. They both had luggage and were obviously not related -- not by blood, anyway. The boy was quite insolent to the woman, who was very talkative. He seemed eager to get away from her.

I was reading "My Darling, My Hamburger," a 1969 YA novel by Paul Zindel that I remembered from my own childhood (but hadn't read). As they got up to leave the train, the woman pointed at my book and said, "Oh! We've just come from Hamburg!" I laughed because that is not the connection I would have made, seeing that book title. "I'm pretty sure they're talking about the sandwich," I laughed. "We're the true Hamburgers," she said, adding with a roll of the eyes: "Well, I'm a Big Mac."

In Belsize Park, the local yarn artists have added a holiday-season decoration to the postbox on England's Lane where their fanciful and elaborate creations often appear.

Pretty amazing!

Last night, I had my martini(s) and watched "Absolutely Fabulous," as promised, before Dave and I finished off "Black Doves" on Netflix. It's so bloody and employs such spy-movie archetypes that it's almost a parody, but we really enjoyed it.

And then we went to bed, and...I couldn't sleep. And it's just as well, because the next door neighbors started setting off fireworks around 11:30 p.m., followed by a citywide explosive rumble at midnight. It really did sound like we were under attack.

I got up and made this video, first of the neighbor's fireworks and then of the distant ones visible over the city from our dining room window. In that part of the video, the fireworks on the horizon to the right may be in the vicinity of Hyde Park or Battersea, I think, while the pastel colors reflecting from the clouds on the left come more from the big display on the Thames Embankment. I first started recording through the window, and then had the bright idea to open it and stick my camera outside so you could hear the pops and rumbles. (Fortunately, Olga has never been alarmed by such shenanigans and she slept through it all.)

So I wound up participating in some New Year's festivities after all, in my own dining room!