I am grateful for the language, brought on boats across the North Sea, grown from the land, sliced and spiced by Normans (more Northmen), spoken over apples and wheat, spinning jennys and steam trains, Carnaby Street and the International Space Station.
I am grateful for the hybrid vigour of the language that meets on the electronic, photonic jetstream and mixes and jostles and flows, this way and that, over England and India, America and Australia, South Africa and Canada--and more, so many more: a communion of billions, whose verbs smell of wide rivers or red dust or stone canals.
I am grateful for generations of storytellers, who first learnt to stand by the flickering fire and frighten their audience; who sang their children to sleep and bad dreams with tales of wolves and woodcutters; who sucked on their goose quills and trembled with excitement because they could see, they could hear, they could feel what had not happened.
I am grateful for those who have learnt and made efficient the delivery of food (and heat, and clothes) so that I can live a life of the mind here in my house at the end of the road.
I am grateful for humankind, who meld electricity and plastic and brushed aluminium, stylised marks and animal metaphor, emotion and reason, to create the machinery which lets me think this, write this, say this, to you.
I am grateful that I breathe, that I think, that I love and fume and dream.
I am grateful that I am stubborn enough to wrestle the fume and dream into story.
I am grateful for readers, who allow the story in.
I am grateful.
I am thankful.
