Happy New Year to everyone and it’s that time when we become a little retrospective. To be honest, the New Year thing washes over me these days. One year just rolls into another doesn’t it? You don’t need a special date to make plans and resolutions, you can start and re-organise your life any time you like and those annual resolutions will most likely fall by the wayside just as they do every year. But it’s not a bad idea to reflect on the last year and make some plans for the new one. If you have nothing to aim at, then how can you hope to hit the target?

I’ve just had a quick look back at my posts last year and it brought back so many good feelings from my visits to the woods. Projects I completed, family and friends visiting, cooking over a camp fire, observations of nature and making friends with a robin. To list a few successful projects – rebuilding the composting toilet walls, helping a pal build a shavehorse, making a woodland rustic chair, building a pond and renewing my felling licence. Getting and award for my blog was an unexpected treat.

Wildlife highlights were discovering a colony of feral honey bees in the owl nest box, learning about fungi identification, butterflies and the Tawny Owl bathing in my pond.

Camping trips were below expectations, I only managed to fit in one. I hope to get a few more in this year and hopefully try my hand at some winter or early spring camping. It’s such a lovely experience to wake up early and see the woods at that time of day, listen to the dawn chorus, light a fire and cook breakfast. It’s a feeling of freedom and truly being alive.

I know a few of my friends suffer with mental health issue, anxiety, stress, depression and I do too at times. It’s a common symptom of our modern way of living. We are normally surrounded by concrete, plastic, traffic and the constant brainwashing of media on our tv and phones. To spend time in the woods either with friends or on our own is truly a healing experience and I cannot recommend it too much. You don’t need to own your own woods to benefit from nature. Just get out there, take a flask of tea or coffee and find a nice quite spot in the woods, by a lake or river, on the moors or the beach and just sit, watch, listen and take in the beauty of it all. It’s where we come from and it’s where we truly belong. Thanks to all of you for taking time to read my ramblings and for the kind feedback many of you have given me. Hope this year is a good one for you.