Prompt: One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you're choosing that word. Now, imagine it's one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

It's much harder than you think to choose just one lonely little word to summarise an entire year in one's life. So many trends and themes that to single out just one of them gives a skewed impression. At first, I was going to choose 'loss' as the word that encapsulates my experience of 2010. I lost my job. I lost my Best of Cats. I lost my perspective and my groove. Loss was certainly a dominant theme in my year. But I decided that although 2010 has been a helluva horrible year it's too defeatist to leave only a negative memory of it. And so I'm going to choose instead the rather more upbeat, survive. Because hey, I did survive it! And that's about the best thing I have to say for a year that would have been best stuffed into a dark bag on Jan 1st and beaten to death with a large stick ;)