  There was a time when New Year's Day was the most documented day of the year - diaries abandoned after a single entry.
The emptiness of the day itself, the year not yet really begun, the festivities over (at last) and what better way to fill out the day than inscribing one's intentions, formalised as grandly capitalized Resolutions. Then the year got started, everything went back to normal, the diaries, and most of the intentions probably, forgotten. Now our diaries are everywhere, normal is nowhere, and we have these machines to do our remembering for us... urlLink Once upon a time, I climbed a mountain at New Year. 1984? 1985? One or the other. The mountain was Ben Rinnes (840m, doesn't sound as impressive as 2,759ft, does it?
), the northernmost of the Bens, southwest of Dufftown, and no more than about 4km from Glen Fiddich. There were white hares up there, peering at us from rocky look-outs at a safe distance, and then haring off over the snow - as they are, of course, completely entitled to do - before we got anywhere near them... We climbed the northern face, in shade, so as we reached the higher ground, windblown ice and snow, cloud peeling off the mountaintop and trailing away behind us, the watery midwinter sun down into our faces through the ice mist.
One of the most unworldlly environments I've ever experienced... you can find Ben Rinnes by clicking on the (unhelpfully reduced) map there, finding Dufftown with the search facility, and heading SW. The urlLink Ordnance Survey site appears to offer no way to bookmark locations, nor to determine a grid reference for a location, once found. Room for a little improvement there, I think... 
