La Nouvelle Année and a few of my Favourite Things

So this is the New Year/And I don’t feel any different/The clanking of crystal/Explosions off in the distance

So everybody put your best suit or dress on/Let’s make believe that we are wealthy for just this once/Lighting firecrackers off on the front lawn/As thirty dialogues bleed into one

I wish the world was flat like the old days/Then I could travel just by folding a map/No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways/There’d be no distance that could hold us back

- death cab for cutie

The lyrics of emo/indie fencesitters and Seth Cohen pin-ups Death Cab for Cutie seem apt as 2008 and its events (natural, political, financial - it all seemed particularly calamitous) segues quietly into 2009.

When I Grow Up

As the year lazily plots it course, the reappearance of another birthday on the horizon inspired a period of quiet introspection; stock was taken of last year’s events and what I had learnt, and there was much contemplation of what the new year may bring. With this reflective mindset and the annual ’sloughing off of the old self’ fast approaching, off I trotted to Digitise or Die: What is the Future of the Book?, a discussion between Margaret Atwood, Andrew O’Hagan, Erica Wagner, the literary editor at the Times and Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber at Southbank on a topic close to my heart.