I mainly remember the New Year celebrations of 2000 for the macabre reason that I witnessed a fight and stabbing outside the Shell garage on the Whitechapel Road as I walked home to Bow. I'm not much interested in fireworks and resented the time that I spent crushed in the shadow of London Bridge waiting for the display to start. Ten years later I went to bed at 9.30pm on New Year's Eve and the sparkling wine remained undrunk.
It's an aribtrary date on which to reflect but everyone else is doing it so I thought I may as well.
The year 2000 was the year I finally made a breakthrough in my research at King's. I had been a PhD student since 1998 and until then the work was well summed up by my supervisor whom I overhead saying to a colleague "he puts a lot of effort in but there is nothing to show for it yet". When it did come it came fairly quickly though and I soon had two papers on boundary perturbations of singular second order elliptic operators published. The best part of my work on Ultracontractivity and Neumann Laplacians came in the second half of the year and I remember receiving an email from my supervisor during one of the Christmas parties to go ahead and submit it to one of the most prestigious journals in functional analysis (imaginatively called The Journal of Functional Analysis). I knew at that moment that my PhD so long stuck in the sand was finished.
This is not going to be an autobiography since it would not get finished but it sets the scene for such big changes in my life and in the world. I had my viva on September 10th 2001 and the next day we all looked on in amazement and horror at an Italian text based news service (the only one we could get working so heavy was the internet traffic) that described how commercial airliners had been used to crash into the World Trade Center. September 17th I joined the finance industry when I started at ABN Amro. Jay, whom I had known since May, and I officially became a couple on December 21st and for years this was our anniversary.
The early days were extremely hard and frankly how we survived in that tiny studio appartment in Streatham I will never quite know. There have been ups and downs, swings and roundabouts, scenic routes and wrong-turns all along the way but somehow we end the year and decade as parents to the most wonderful little girl in the world. In truth it could be said that for three years we "put a lot of effort in but there is nothing to show for it yet" but that all fades away to nothing when I glance in her travel cot.
Now I would not be so crass as to say it has been the best of Christmases. For so many reasons it has not been what we would want, not least because we wanted finally to be in our own home for once and for that home not to be Field View - next to our neighbours from Hell screaming abuse at our oil tanker delivery because it has blocked their access for five minutes (they could of course and did use the alternative access through the side of their property).
But that does not concern Harriet and there have been wonderful moments. Sarah and Rob's hospitality was exceptional and the meal was superlative. It was such a great boost for my parents to be there and also to be able to see everyone later in Scotland thanks to our very capable Land Rover.
But now the wrapping paper and more is tossed aside now is the time to look forward. We had one dream and she came true so now is certainly not the time to be satisfied and stop dreaming. The most important gift we can give to Harriet is at least one more brother or sister. We would do anything for her of course but it is increasingly evident just how quickly she is growing up and becoming her own independent person. It would be wonderful for her to have an ally to face the worlds of school and play that will be apart from us and we hope she would learn to cherish and protect another as well as learning to share possessions and control.
It's not immediately clear how we will achieve this. I have heard some amazing fictions about how much I earn but the truth of the matter is that we really couldn't afford Harriet if we stopped to think about it. FX movements alone have made everything about a fifth more expensive. I have some good news in that I have been promoted at work which cannot do any harm (although it will delay for some time our expected move to the US).
Somehow we must. We must also look more broadly outside our little family unit to the type of world we are bringing them to. Maybe it is just my 'glass half empty' character but when I recall the events of the last decade they are pretty negative. From the destruction of the twin towers, to the many wars raging across the world, to the collapse of any meaningful outcome at Copenhagen and yes of course to the greed and idiocy endemic in the financial services there seems to be an overwhelming narrative of gloom to me. Unquestioning subservience to dogma and rank hypocrisy are the threads that bind together this tapestry.
Still there is a little smile gazing at me with two little teeth. Now the hand starts to wave and she giggles and I cannot help but join in. It does not matter what you preach or what ideology you espouse - it is by your actions and inactions that you are truly known. For me then the only thing to do is pick her up and give her and Jay a hug. The teenies, the deccars, the 2010s whatever you may call them - bring them on!
