We are back, once again in those nameless inbetween-days recovering from over indulgence.
Those of us who don't have to go back to work yet are meant to be recovering from the excesses of Xmas and filling our days with nothing but relaxation.
And yet....there is a vague sense of edginess, a feeling that we are waiting for something that hasn't happened yet..
For a new year? A new beginning? A return to work? A return to all things familiar and slightly boring?
Time pressures have disappeared, replaced, instead, by the pressures of filling time.
There is no reason to get up in the morning.
No reason to eat breakfast before lunch.
No particular reason to do anything at any particular time.
We are free to do nothing at all.
And all this freedom and resting takes a lot of getting used to.
We have all the time in the world to spend with the people we've been longing to spend all the time in the world with.
And suddenly all the time in the world can seem like a big,beckoning space.
With as long as we want to talk about everything we have meant to talk about all year,we find that we have suddenly run out of words.
We are used to making conversation in short, urgent bursts.
We live in a world of sound-bites, rushed conversations and 60 second news.
In a world of acronyms and text speak.
Sitting, listening to our teenage children and their teenage cousins huddled together on the sofa on Christmas Day, I found myself wondering if they had actually started to speak a different language.
Theirs is a world shaped by social media sentences and individual letters instead of words.
Sometimes it feels as though conversation is a dying art
Grudgingly all the cousins, 4 boys and 3 girls, had agreed to participate in the dramatised court-case involving stolen jewels and dubious characters that their grandad had written especially for them.
But under pretend cross -examination they answered mostly with monosyllables and giggles and the odd 'LOL." or "TY."
Try as he might, their once-upon-a-lawyer grandad, could not really get them to enter into the spirit of his little drama.
The ad-libbed performance, supposed take up most of the afternoon, lasted only half an hour before the teenagers made their escape.
" I sent them the outline a week ago," complained their grandad, ' they were meant to read it and create their characters. They've had lots of time."
"Perhaps they've had too much time," I suggested. " Perhaps it would have worked better if you had given them the outline 10 minutes before it started and told them they had 5 minutes to create their characters."
" How can you create a character in 5 minutes,"sighed their grandad, folding away his Christmas masterpiece.
But the truth is, 5 minutes is all that it takes.
5 minutes is all that it takes for the world to change completely.
5 minutes is all that it takes for planes to fly into buildings, for bombs to explode, for river banks to burst or for freak waves to wash away an entire island.
5 minutes is all that it takes for crazy people to do crazy things.
So 5 minutes is definitely enough time for lively teenagers to create make-believe characters.
Our lives are a chain of sometimes-intense, sometimes-meaningless 5 minute intervals linked together by hopes and dreams and the occasional bar of chocolate.
Christmas day faded into Christmas night.
The teenagers turned the music up and danced their way into boxing day., chattering happily in their mostly incomprehensible language about mostly incomprehensible things.
And as we " oldies," sat and watched, we couldn't help smiling.
Smiling at the happiness they found just by being together.
Smiling at the fun they were having.
Smiling at the memories they were creating.
Because what I've realised as I'm writing this, is that it's not the speed at which we live our lives that matters, but the depth and strength of the memories we create.
And one day, when all-the-time-in-the-world weighs heavily upon our shoulders, it's remembering all the 5 minutes filled with love and life and laughter that will keep us going.
So here's to 2016 being a year full of perfect 5-minute-moments...and lots and lots of chocolate.
