The last day of the year, and a kestrel flew out of 'my' oak tree as I came out of the wood to walk down the footpath. A superb sighting:  the salmon-rust back, the pointed wings, the slender tail, the hawk eye as it torpedoed across the field and up into a distant hedgerow.

It had been mild all day, one of those dull grey overcast, quiet days of the year's ending, and relatively birdless: yet I'd seen a great spotted woodpecker on my bird feeder, before it was outnumbered by a cluster of long-tailed tits (at one time I counted ten on the nuts and fatballs at one time). And as I walked back to my car, fieldfares flew out of the hedge chacking, fluttering nervously away for cover, tawny-winged, slate-backed, speckled-breasted, pale-fronted, these sturdy strong thrushes I love so much who keep me company on winter walks.

A post-Christmas thought:

We have a suffocating sense of luxury and no sense at all of liberty. All the pleasure-hunters seem to be themselves hunted. All the children of fortune seem to be chained to the wheel. There is very little that really even pretends to be happiness in all this sort of harassed hedonism.

G. K. Chesterton