On the twelfth day of Christmas...

Yes I am still alive and Happy New Year to you all! It was brought in round a dancing bon fire and with many a firework and no little amount of the fruit of the vine or nectar of the Norse gods (as the Sprit says. She also says to say hello in lieu of actually posting on her own).
I am also bid to wish you all a happy Twelfth Night and near happy Feast of Epiphany. Here in the country of the Cajuns Epiphany is the opening of Carnival season which will last until Mardi Gras (the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday for anyone who may not know). I am told that Carnival is marked with balls and parades (and beads...) Unfortunatly we are leaving before thing really get under way, which is a shame...

We finished watching Lawrence of Arabia this evening and I am left with my head and thoughts in a whirl. I hope I well be diciplined enough to at least scrible down some more of what I think of it in the next few days, but if not here is a little bit. It is a sad story, sad and haunting. The Sprit aptly remarked that he was not a god, nor a saint, nor really in my own opinion a great hero. He was a man, very, very much a man. He did not know himself, not who he was or what he most wanted and this was in the end his undoing. The friend who introdudced us to the movie said he related very much to Lawrence and I find that vaguely frightening in some way. He said that it seems very true to life that all things, great and small, come to an end, and the more one devotes himself to something great, the further from it he will end up. Perhaps this troubles me because for all of my deep facade of cynisism, I am in the end a romantic and I need that ideal to be pasionate about and love almost blindly. Perhaps more on this later...