Chinese New Year - in January 2012

I've missed it. I assumed it was in February. Last year, wasn't it in February?

This year the date was January 23rd and enter the Year of the Dragon. I'm a horse myself. A wooden horse, no less.

It gave me the shivers when I realised that I might have been the Trojan horse itself. A gift boldly given that contains nasty stuff that you don't expect. Sometimes life is like that. You think you have it figured out. You might have psychic friends who tell you what to expect - warn you of the worst or the best... Then it springs. Or, at least, you wheel it in and it delivers exactly what you don't want.

You take a strange byway. Your life might even double back on itself and you find yourself facing that aspect of yourself that you thought you'd done away with years ago. Or that you'd sorted. That dreaded truth. However, you hadn't dealt with it. You'd just buried it and hoped it was dead. And now it's struggled its way out of the earth and is lumbering after you, eyes glittering, and reaching its purple fingers towards your frantically thudding and terrified heart. Yes, like a zombie. Little wonder those films are terrifying...

We're always being tested, always learning.

No wonder I feel comfortable as a home educating facilitator.

It's closer now. Lumbering more loudly. Scraping its misshapen feet along the ground. Moaning and - oh, dear - is it crying?

That leaden feeling that you have made a mistake somewhere. That you've committed yourself to a course of action that has brought you to the moment. The moment when...

the zombie grabs you, cracks open your breast bone and yanks your heart from your palpitating chest...

Have you made a mistake so big? Have you condemned your children to misery because they haven't passed millions of exams and fought the good fight in school?

You yank your heart back, stuff it into its rightful place, seal up the gaping wound and stare the zomb down.

Have I done the wrong thing? you ask yourself.

Nah, you reply.

It's all good.

Brains for tea anyone?