I've always found the New Year period a struggle. Perhaps it's part of being an unreconstructed Puritan? Perhaps it's the result of spending too many New Year's Eves coping with Greek men smoking like chimneys and playing cards very rowdily, of having to prop my eyelids open in order to drink warm bubbly at midnight?
I don't know, but even when young I never joined the excited throngs in Bourke Street or elsewhere. I've never been a party animal, and these days I am the spoilsport who retires to bed with a book at about 10pm.
This New Year season has been particularly bad, and saw me becoming a Twitter tragic so that I could keep up with the news of ever more disastrous fires in eastern Australia. I eventually realised that my compulsion to be constantly informed was a symptom of absentee (and survivor) guilt, because it often seems that when crisis strikes my family or my country I am missing.
I suppose some people will see that notion as egotistical self-indulgence, but it's the way I feel, nevertheless: there is a particular dimension to not being there, which is felt by many expatriates. But I also feel impotent anger at the amount of manipulation and chicanery that is currently going on at the highest level in Australia.
And then fires of a different sort started up in the Middle East. Suddenly it all seemed just too much: one way or another the planet seemed to be about to be smashed to smithereens and blasted to oblivion.
However, on the day after Epiphany, a major feast day in the Orthodox Church, I found myself outside Kalamata's imposing Church of the Archangels, and went in to light a candle. I do this from time to time, although apart from thinking of friends in trouble, I must admit my thoughts and prayers cannot be said to be orthodox, with or without the capital letter. It must also be said that they are more like cheeky instructions or demands: Please make politicians X, Y and Z see some sense! And please keep them on the straight and narrow!
The church was still decorated with palm fronds on every pew and blue and white flowers forming arches over the day's icon. The colours of blue, the symbol of heaven, and white, representing the divine light, were everywhere. Golden urns containing holy water were next to the icon, for Epiphany