In case you're reading this in the New Year, have a happy one. And I hope Christmas was all you hoped it would be, too.

I seem to be enjoying quite a literary Christmas, accompanied by much organ playing and music appreciation. I say literary because I'm reading John Bailey's remarakable account of Iris Murdoch. I'd love to say, honestly, that I was re-reading it, but I admit that I never read it, nor did I ever see the film. His beautiful, flowing use of our language is incomparable, other than by his late wife, of course, and his touching description of their intellectual, unusual, yet simultaneously simple marriage is remarkable in so many ways.

My holiday project of delving constantly into the works of Thomas Hardy has brought more interesting results, and I couldn't help but think, while on a walk in the beautiful Dorset countryside the other day of his magical poem 'The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House' in which he describes a deer looking into the window of a cottage in deepest rural Dorset, where the inhabitants of the cottage are sitting by the fire in the snow, unaware that they are being observed. I know who wrote it, but who was the narrator? I often ponder that.

And then that made me think of Louis MacNiece's brilliant poem 'Snow', in which he manages to explain the shortest period of time in which something wonderful happened.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.
I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

Don't you love that? I do.