Hooray! A new year! 6 months ago….

Yes, it’s the first of January and that means there is much to look forward to, perhaps this year, humanity will find a global harmony to live and work together, meaning the world will seem a far less disturbin… hang on….(looks at calendar)….what do you mean it’s the 5th of June? What the hell? Where did the last 6 months go?

It’s hard to imagine that so much can happen in such a short space of time to everyone in such a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, after all, they say a week is a long time in Politics, so 6 months must be at least the equivalent of an ice age.

But events have indeed moved on since the end of last year, where the Euro was on the brink of collapse, people were losing their jobs left, right and any other point of the compass, and generally the feeling you had after watching the news was that of a chronically depressed lemming who got nowhere speaking to those Samaritan chaps.

It would be nice and easy to go off on a diatribe about how the government makes so many u-turns about their policies that you’d think they were stuck on roundabouts in Milton Keynes, how Rupert Murdoch has settled back to sleep nicely now the focus is away from his evil empire a bit now, and how things in the middle east always seem to heat up when no-one’s paying attention to them, but not this time.

It’s been quite a bad start to the year in very personal ways and although some events will never see the light of day in public, not unless I make it some day as someone with cash and a hot wife, then people want to make some money over it from the tabloids, there is one event that perhaps will foreshadow this year more than most.

When this blog started some time ago, it was full of over personalised rubbish which for the most part, interested no-one.

I took the position of steering away from that, as frankly, no-one actually cares about that sort of thing, unless you’re a public figure or just the latest on the reality TV conveyor belt who will do the rounds in various magazines and talk shows.

And although that actually became a bone of contention for someone during the beginning of the year during another time of turmoil which didn’t end well, I remained resolute in keeping to that ideal, as there are indeed more interesting fodder to roast over an open keyboard.

For today, at the end of the four day long bank holiday weekend, I do step back into the personal arena, if only briefly, so that there is some form of record of something dear to myself as well as others. In a way, it’s been kind of putting me off coming back to write again for quite a while though I wouldn’t had said so before.

This year, we lost our very dear Aunty Bett.

You will be missed dearly.

She had been ill for some time, finally dying in a rest home just outside of Oswestry in March of this year, and the impact has been severe in some respects.

We lost an amazing human being, who was there for us in good times and bad and she will be missed. The picture above, shows her with our Uncle David, who passed away some years before. That was never acknowledged on the blog back in 2005, for being personal and therefore not readily something to be shared on the Internet willy nilly.

But perhaps I had it wrong then, and given the impact they had on many people’s lives, it would be inappropriate not to honour their memory in some fashion on this digital tome.

Words often fail us when it comes to talking about someone who passed away. I refer not to writing about Kim Jong Ill, whom I wrote about last December with various comical (or not) digs, I refer to when it was someone very close to you, who did and influenced a lot in your life and in some respects, help to shape you who you are today.

It also feels that no matter what I would actually type, it wouldn’t be good enough to convey the reality of what is felt by a great many people, who knew and was proud to know them.

That is the legacy left by both Aunty Bett and Uncle Dave, and it will be noted, even if it’s just on one page on some idiot’s web site, that they are remembered at least fondly and forever more.

RIP Aunty Bett.