For creature of habit Cally Callomon, 2024 was a year of timetables, lists and order.

_{Inondation – What the French call a flood, the English call too much.}

I’m a creature of habit, a slave to routine, willingly bound by timetables, lists and order — habits inherited from German and Swiss parents, perhaps, but also tools that aid the pleasure found in a varied, full and busy life. 

During those lost lockdown years a friend took his son outside for a walk at the same time each day and they both stared at the same ash tree. He made his son comment on what had changed since the previous day, not just in the tree but in the climate, the sound, the temperature and the mood. So likewise, my virgo imbued masochistic tendency forces me to swim in my pond the same way for the same time each day. 

I dug this pond, some six foot deep into the stagnant shallow cattle pond that was there before; it was a useless bowel of coagulated soup that flooded the farm buildings after an inundation of rainfall. So seeing as how those farm buildings became my studio I had to ensure flooding ceased, which it has, due to a wider faster escape and a deeper capacity. This year’s rain has ensured the pond level has just about coped with the torrential rains — though swimming amongst rain drops that explode as they hit the surface is a ‘difference’ that couldn’t go unnoticed. 

As my head floats forward at water-level I see each bank differently each day, just as a walk ‘there’ is different to the walk ‘back’: same path, different view. Just as returning to a well-loved book, record, film, poem for the umpteenth time reveals a different view. Same book, different story. This may be why my eight Desert Island Discs would suffice, but I’d choose seven: one per day, in the same strict weekly rotation, each one sounding different each day. 

This obsession with rote lasts a whole year. As I age I feel the need to travel away less, lest I miss a change at home. The idea of cheating winter by a beach holiday, or escaping my vast garden and woods in summer feels wrong, though a few brief stints in France this year only fuelled the enthusiasm to stay outdoors. Next March I shall return to New York and travel across America for the first time in well over six years. I used to go there regularly, but now? To miss spring? I’ll just have to adjust. As Bill Drummond once said, “Travel narrows the mind”.

It’s a coping mechanism and just look how privileged we are to be able to adopt such procedures in a world of extremes where so many have ghastly procedure dumped on them, silently, from a great height. 

Some routines depend on a needs-must device, some are governed by technology, or need, whim, chaos, disorder, mood, or desires. Me? I’m happy with filofax and propelling pencil.

The reflections are those shifting myriad pictures on the surface of the pond and the shadows are those cast by the loss of friends, a loss which upsets my routine by not being able to give them a quick call, by them not being able to read my postcard.