Welcome to 2004, and the year's first issue of BEYOND THE GRAVY.

In April last year, just after Jude died, I sent out an ezine headed Do It While You Can. Life hangs by a thin thread, I wrote; procrastinate at your peril. I noted that, by and large, Jude and I hadn't just talked about the things that mattered most to us; we had tried to build our lives on them. For that I was immensely grateful.

That said, there were some things we hadn't got round to doing. One of them was a family holiday in the South Island. That part of New Zealand is full of stunning landscapes. If you've seen The Lord of the Rings, you'll know what I mean. We had intended to go camping there in January 2003, but had put it off for a year. Bad call.

Anyway, last month the kids and I went to Middle-earth for our midsummer holiday. And what a holiday it proved to be. We horse-trekked on tussocked uplands, cruised on a fiord, played with dolphins, spied on nesting albatrosses and penguins, panned for gold, breakfasted on muesli, cream and cherries beside an alpine lake. I'll always remember sitting at dusk, drinking hot chocolate, watching the sun set on Mt Cook, and listening to a waitress called Bianca sing in a sublime Sarah Vaughan voice, "I'm so happy because I'm free."

The trip, in short, was full of magical moments. Jude should have been there, but she wasn't. Despite that, we had a marvelous time, accumulating happy memories that will stay with us forever.

There is much wisdom in Jack Kornfield's words:

When people come to the end of their life and look back, the questions that they most often ask are not usually, "How much is in my bank account?" or "How many books did I write?" or "What did I build?" or the like. If you have the privilege of being with a person who is aware at the time of his or her death, you find the questions such a person asks are very simple: "Did I love well?" "Did I live fully?" "Did I learn to let go?"

For too many years, I placed too much emphasis on Kornfield's first three questions. No longer: these days my focus is fixed firmly on the second three.