Blackbird singing in the dead of night

Isn't this a stunning photo? One of the Asiatic lilies glowing in the dappled shade. Sometimes you just know you've got a winner.

So the year is trickling to its end. I always think that this time of year life is like a piece of old chewing-gum, there's no flavour left, but you keep on chewing anyway. We start to pin our hopes on next year. It will be better, we say to ourselves, knowing all the while that next year will be much like this, a mix of good and bad and the sublimely ho-hum. There's a poem by Robert Frost, I think it's called The oven bird:

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a midsummer and a midwood bird, 

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again....

The question that he frames in all but words,

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

(Apologies to R. Frost for any inaccuracies in quotation). 

This time of  year does feel diminished to me. Spring and early summer have slipped away, and now we look at ripening fruit with autumn behind them. As an atheist with pagan tendencies, the birthday of Jesus leaves me unmoved, and the commercial whirl is not my commercial whirl. So, it will soon be time to make New Year's resolutions, the same resolutions I made last year and failed to carry out. Have more fun, be more social, be more creative, etc., etc., etc. Next year looms warm and bright, as we cast off the old year and its dreary worn-out clothes.