Happy New Year!

When Dave and I emerged from Gatwick Airport this morning, bleary-eyed from our overnight flight, we made our way to the train station for the journey into the city. This was the scene that greeted us as we waited on the platform.

"Here we are, back in gloomy London," Dave quipped.

The sun seems measurably weaker here, and the air is certainly colder. As we were coming in for a landing, all the farmland surrounding the airport looked gray-green with a coating of frost. I feared for the avocado, but it seems to have done just fine in our absence. We will cover it tomorrow to protect it from the approaching "snow bomb."

I took this picture out the window of our jet as we came in over the English coastline. I believe that's the Isle of Wight directly below the plane, and I was intrigued by the clear line of clouds out on the horizon. They look like a gigantic cliff face, don't they? A falaise, as the French call it -- one of my favorite French words. In fact, I think I was seeing from the air the same phenomenon I saw Tuesday in Florida from the ground -- the sharp edge of a weather front.

Our flight was smooth and I did sleep a bit, though I'm exhausted today. I'm glad to be back on our couch, sipping a cup of Cafe Naviera, a Cuban-style coffee with chicory that I usually buy at Publix when I go to Tampa. It's a little bit of sunny Florida, here in the frozen north!

We thought flying on New Year's Eve might prove an interesting experience. Would there be champagne? Party hats? Would there be an announcement when the midnight hour struck, and in which time zone?

In fact, the flight was like any other. I was kind of surprised, actually. I didn't expect sparklers but I thought there'd be something. The pilot may have wished us a Happy New Year when he made his remarks, but that was pretty much it. I did notice while taking off in the darkness over Tampa that fireworks were going off here and there beneath us -- blooming like little chrysanthemums over the city lights. From the air, fireworks look minuscule.

I spent most of the flight reading "Tramps Like Us," a 25-year-old novel by Joe Westmoreland about coming of age as a gay man in the late '70s and early '80s. It was recently republished and I'm enjoying it a lot. It's very readable and reminds me of my own youth, though Westmoreland's semi-autobiographical character had a much wilder life than I ever did!