January 2- Crisis

It was two years ago, we think, since the meteor fell. At the time we had been busy with our pastimes, entering our dogs in competitions or writing our weekly columns about cakes, so the news that the world might be completely annihalated came as a shock to us. Or not as a shock, if we were honest, but rather a novelty- we were used to hearing about annihalation in places we had never heard of or from threats we only pretended to understand. To be threatened by something so nakedly terrifying was somehow the same yet different; like an especially spicy curry, like a kiss.

But of course our fears came to nothing, and the world's authorities got together to freeze the meteor metres above the water where it fell. In the coming days there were many excited reports in the media, and many of us went to the city below it to photograph ourselves pointing in mock horror into the sky. But in time, of course, we moved on to different stories and different threats, and we began to think of the meteor as just one of the many strange things we did not understand about life in our own century. Occasionally, of course, we would hear about how fragments had fallen and crushed a monument, or an aquaintence's lover, and when a chunk of asteroid flattened an elephant reserve and sent ivory prices soaring we had to listen to our tedious friends discussing it for longer than we would have liked. But in the main it was just one of the things we managed to forget, on a list that stretched longer than we could know.

And so we think -we know- that the crisis is over, and that this year we are right to have other concerns. Experts among us may say that the meteor must fall, and must do so soon, but their logic has never been easy to understand, and we are determined that things in our lives must stay the same. This year we will knit and we will bake, we'll laugh and fight and strive to forget to die, and we'll never think about the giant mass of the metor, casting its shadow over all we choose to do.