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Good Morning, My Desk Diary for 2021 has arrived. And for a moment I think all will be well. The clean slate is so appealing. Like the unused exercise book at the start of a new term, it promises productive days ahead. Its colour coded symmetry and tastefully curated poems set alongside the seven days of the week suggest an ordered world. It’s filled with potent blank spaces. There are pages of notes at the back for ideas as yet unhatched. Future disasters are unacknowledged in this clean, uninfected ledger. It invites me to write in some things that might happen. It’s calling me to make plans. Then I look at this year’s Desk Diary. And I think you didn’t see that coming did you? It’s a brave person who makes any plans in such times. The only things that happened as expected and written down were the Bank Holidays and Saint Days. And, hopefully, Christmas Day – not cancelled yet. It is an itinerary of the Crossed out, the Cancelled and the Postponed. That planned trip to the desert. Nick Cave at the 02 on Thursday 14th of May. Taking my friend to a game at Cardiff. Having my aunt to tea. It wasn’t to be. Reviewing this year’s diary entries is to be confronted with the full meaning of Robert Burns’ line about the best laid plans of mice and men going awry. Only the desk diary’s poems have stood the test of these times. I’d planned to read one a week . But I got distracted by long days and dog days, repeating but not rhyming. But I’m catching up now before I bin the year. There is Wordsworth with ‘The world is too much with us’; Larkin saying ‘there’s nothing to be said.’ Blind Milton worrying about his future and hearing God’s reassurance in the darkness. And this week’s poem The Oxen by Thomas Hardy, who wrote that if someone had asked him on Christmas Eve to ‘Come, see the Oxen kneel’ he would ‘go with him in the gloom, Hoping it may be so.’ There are warnings in scripture about making plans and getting too far ahead of ourselves. And there’s that line that if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans. But I’ve always thought that quip does people and plans and God a disservice. People are, after all, creatures that plan and most of us make them in the hope and expectation of good things. I believe plans matter to people; and that plans matter to God. And sometimes they rhyme. Christmas could be seen as a plan. A cosmic and parochial plan to include all people. An ever-recurring poem of redemption and rescue in which a God comes among us. And we are invited to go and meet Him in the gloom. Hoping it may be so.