To every thing there is a season. And now it's time for the end of year report. How did the present year shape up in the end? No complaints. None. Not a scintilla. 2012 has been just dandy.

Have a great start to 2013 everyone...

Archimedes

Marcel Proust observed that "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes" So true.

Bar Vetro - a standout from the crowd button hole sized cafe cum deli opposite my apt on east 58th street. Glorious coffee and the divinest corn muffin ever.

Whoever does not love New York does not love life.

A superb Moral Maze this evening: abortion, which as Michael Buerk said in his introduction is the debate that buckles under the heat of ferocious argument from opponents and proponents. For anyone interested, I'm firmly in the latter camp. To roll it back is an assault on a woman's right to be, on her autonomy.

This is my equivalent to "On first looking into Chapman's Homer.."; that dizzying moment for Keats when he became aware of the, for him, hitherto hidden glories of classical Greek poetry.

That line now stands and probably has for decades as a synonym for epiphany. That door opening instance; there's no longer any before, it's only after now.

Well, it happened to me this afternoon at the London Wetland Bird centre. An epiphany with birds? They can happen anywhere. Sudden realisations of otherness, or a striking new awareness for wont of another term, are n't aesthetically reserved. Mine was this afternoon. The merest glimpse, almost a sliver of a glance of one of Britain's rarest birds - the mysterious, fugitive, Bittern. So are it's become a stalwart unfortunately of the Red List of threatened species. Blink and it could be gone

And I did, and so did it. Gone with not even a puff of smoke to say where it had been. Not a trace apart from a few trembling reeds.

Moments like this can only really happen in London. In fact they're meant to happen here. Ordained to.

Where else could you find the biggest Bavarian winter fair outside Germany, where all but a handful of the stall holders are German speakers, and where a lively, exuberant male duo can be belting out the punchiest version of The Wild Rover outside of Dublin in German in front of a boisterous, tipsy horde of German tourists, clutching steins, arms waving and dancing like the legendary uncle at the wedding. Yep, London. Where else.

The other image I can't let go is of a veiled woman in the midst of it all, carefree and smiling, dancing. This is what life is about, should be about: living, laughing, and loving. What else is there...

Only in London can the stars align like this.

'Life is too short too sleep through..." RIP Dennis O'Driscoll, whose verse I only discovered by chance this evening aimlessly wandering through Facebook.

I said to a friend in an e-mail some days ago that:'... can that feeling be beaten of opening a new door on to something unusual and revelatory... ?'  Exactly my mood now after reading my first O'Driscoll poem - 'Someone'.

Eight in the evening and I'm waiting on a very cold Calendonian road to meet a dear friend who I've not seen in a little short of thirty years. We met again only a few years ago through, what else, Facebook.

Did I worry? Of course. Should I have? Yes. Was it a grand reunion ? Absolutely. Two and half hours, or there abouts, and the years rolled back. Unforgettable.

"Maybe it really is true that some books are universal precisely because they are so provincial and spacious precisely because they are so minimalist..."

Amoz Oz in his introduction to My Michael.