Sunnier

I am pleased to report that three weeks in the sunnier disposition of 2023 has so far survived influenza, New Year’s Day, my birthday and, at the time of writing, remains in place, tested, but as yet unbroken. Now, before I start receiving acid comments – most of them from my wife – I would ask you to note that the word I so carefully chose (above) is a comparative adjective and not the more easily quantifiable simple adjective (e.g. sunny). My sunny days, if ever they existed, passed long, long ago with Tank Tops, Cork Heeled Boots, tinned Pink Salmon and Tiger Nuts. Not, I want you to understand, that I have ever been particularly morose – at least not for long – I am, in general, happy far more often than I am not. I just, by and large, prefer to keep it to myself.

So, here is how sunnier works for me. Life is full of ‘inputs’, each of which has any number of possible outcomes, ranging from the best possible at one end, the most likely in the middle and the inevitable crock of shit at the other. Now, if I can somehow manage to lower the anticipated excrement level at that end, surely my disposition must automatically improve. The knowledge that, like it or not, I will end up neck deep in the ordure, can only be lightened by the realization that it is unlikely to be quite as deep as it used to be. In short, it is my intention to raise my faecal threshold against a background of a falling tide.

In fact, I wonder, could it be that the acceptance of doo-doo ahead, is in some way actually itself the source of my comparative sunniness? Perhaps I am reconciled to always, ultimately, ending up in the muck: maybe the ‘bus’ of my life has ‘Poop’ on its destination board; I’ve paid my fare, I know where I’m heading, I can handle it – I’ve had a lot of practice – look at the shiny little smile on my face…

Perhaps I should clarify. I have a very vivid imagination. However bad things could possibly get, I can always think of something worse, so nothing – in my head – is ever quite as terrible as it might be. Ipso facto, all in all, things are not too bad: they could always be much worse.

New Year came and went without a single substantial hit to either ego or id; my birthday passed without a solitary ‘dink’ to my mental armoury. The outlook, as foreshortened as ever it seems to be at this time of year, holds nothing that troubles me more than it did a year ago. I have resolved not to fear the unknown, because it is… unknown. Unless anybody is able to tell me any different, it could be good, it might be bad, but it will never be that bad. I have decided to drive with eyes ahead and not, for a change, fixed onto the rear-view mirror.

So here we are, a few weeks into the New Year – at what stage it becomes The Current Year, I am unsure – and whilst my expectations do not stretch quite as far as it being a good one, I am looking forward to not too bad, and I’m happy with that…

Aurora

On reading that the Aurora Borealis has recently been visible in the North of England and thus convincing myself that I have seen it over the roof of the shed, my memory started to whirr…

Seeing The Northern Lights is, I know, prime bucket list fodder and I consider myself very fortunate indeed that I have done so.

We were in Finland, kitted out in more layers than a politician’s conscience, with nary a single millimetre of flesh exposed to the kind of chill that is apt to snap off unprotected extremities. We had, over the preceding few days, driven skidoos along frozen rivers, dog sleds through glacial forests and been tugged along vast expanses of what a paucity of geographical knowledge allows me only to call frozen tundra (e.g. wherever you looked – up, down, round and across – was white) by reindeers who delivered us to the mouth of a hide tent within which thin slices of their relatives were being slightly singed over an open fire and served with warm Ribena.

We also climbed a mountain – probably a forested hill if you’re being pedantic – with tennis rackets on our feet which worked perfectly well as long as we kept to the path. One step to either side, however, found you buried up to the chest in a sarcophagus of snow that would just not let go. It was a long trek, punctuated by brief spells of pulling/being pulled out of the white powder quagmire and at the summit we sat, again around the obligatory campfire, scanning the heavens, waiting for the lights to arrive. They did not.

In Finland, I am aware, that even in sufficient clothing to double your mass, even in front of a roaring fire, even having drunk the obligatory glass of lukewarm blackcurrant cordial, it is unwise to remain still for more than a few minutes and so, it wasn’t long before our whole little cryo-snake began to meander its way back down again. The journey was a strangely spiritual and bonding one, despite the absence of lights in the sky.

Back at the hotel – via the usual breakneck bus journey – we spent the habitual three hours divesting ourselves of our outer layers before eating dinner accompanied by a single beer costing little more than the price of a bungalow in the Algarve and heading to our room at which point we became aware of an unusual ‘buzz’ about the hotel: The Lights were out. We threw on a couple of dozen layers of clothing – too few as it turns out – and waddled outside and into the bottomless darkness that is the surface of a frozen Finnish lake in the middle of the night, to watch the show.

The Northern Lights – at least in my experience – is a more visceral phenomenon than a visual one: more of a swirling, back-lit, celestial mist than a firework display (the bright colours, it transpires, are only really witnessed through the camera lens – which also reveals that, despite how it feels, you are not alone) but the affect upon the soul, when witnessed against the backdrop of a billion needle-bright stars, is more uplifting than GCSE English allows me to express. Until the cold kicks in – which it does quite quickly when you have rushed out underprepared – and becomes impossible to ignore. The gap between ‘It’s a bit chilly’ and ‘I think I might just have lost a finger’ is short, and pretty soon you find yourself joining the fast-assembling penguin-trail back to the hot chocolate, feeling exactly like a 60 year old man who has just experienced something that, though not at all as he had expected, rather like the comfort of a thermal-lined, base layer gusset, is something he will never forget…

…and then I remembered that we have solar lights on the back of the shed…

Yellow, Orange and Red

Photo by enakshi mukhopadhyaya on Pexels.com

It is one of the vagaries of The Way That I Write that having reached the end I, more often than not, have to go back and change the beginning. ‘The End’ is almost always the point at which I realise that I have nothing more to say. The beginning is where I return to make some sense of it.

In my head, I am in the middle of my life, but biology, family history and that little voice in my head all compete to assure me that I am actually much nearer the end of it, and I am beginning to toy with the idea of trying to make sense of it all. Except that I really don’t want to, because every trip that I take to the beginning brings, perversely, the ending much closer. Many, many posts ago – ‘200 – A Retrospective’ – I used the phrase ‘sucking the colours from a puffin’s bill’ (which itself became the title of a later post) and seemed to me to be a perfect metaphor (simile?) for what I felt was my attitude to life: the desire to drag whatever colour was to be had from the blandest of blank backgrounds in order to fully embrace life: in the words of an old school friend, ‘to kiss the f*ck out of it.’

Such little idioms drop themselves into what is written, I don’t think they are ever consciously thought through, but this one has stuck in my head and every now and then, when I am not at my sunniest, I think about it. There have been some cloudy days in the last year – you may have spotted them – I have lost people whom I always assumed would lose me first, I have confronted demons and, worse, worried about friends who now have to confront their own, but my solace is always in writing and – each time I sit with nothing good on my mind – sticking a straw into that seabird’s beak and sucking for all I am worth is what gets me through. I don’t really do profound – most of the time I don’t even manage found – but I do try to slap a bit of colour on the beige whenever I can.

These colours do not go down like Constable’s; they do not hit pre-loved canvas like those of Van Gogh; they do not have the vibrancy of Pollock, nor the shock of Picasso, but they are there if you choose to look for them. My beloved grandma had Bragolin’s ‘Crying Boy’ on her tiny bungalow wall for all the time I knew her. It is the most god-awful, soul-crushing painting of all time, but she loved it and, as she loved it, I began to see colours in its sepia awfulness that I am sure the artist never intended. In the end, I saw what she saw, and it was full of colour, and it has just occurred to me – because that is the way that things work – that if I went back to the beginning in order to view it from the end, I wouldn’t be seeing her painting at all, I would be seeing my own. And that would make no sense at all.

I think that I am probably already too deep into the New Year to say that, whatever you face in the twelve months ahead, I wish you only yellow, orange and red, but I’ll say it anyway.

Prostate II (A Slight Return)

This little outpouring of middle-aged angst that is ‘Getting On’ actually all began, four years ago, not with inspiration, but with the sound of latex, the smell of Vaseline and the words “Now just raise your knees up to your chest and relax” and all I can remember thinking is, given the circumstances, what kind of person could actually relax. Lying on my side in a doctor’s surgery, aboard what looked uncomfortably like a mortuary trolley, whilst a lady doctor – who it turned out had got much bigger hands than anticipated – prepared to slip in through the ‘out’ door, was not a situation for which the desire to relax sprang easily to mind. And I realise that the gender of a medical practitioner is irrelevant, but, frankly, when you are naked from the T shirt down and have adopted the foetal position, prior to receiving a sheath full of finger, it does add to the discomfort. You determine to breathe deeply and evenly, and you take in one giant gulp of air, releasing it about three minutes later when the voice behind you says “Ok, you can pull your trousers up now” and you hear the distinctive clank of the pedal bin lid.

I have to admit, it was not the first time I had an index finger up my backside. It had happened to me just once before, when I was sixteen and it was, again, a doctor’s digit making the intrusion – lest you should have any contrary impression. On that occasion, it turned out to be acute appendicitis he detected – I ate a pillow that day – but this time I was ready, I knew what was coming, and I had an idea of what the result would be. On this occasion the words “It’s very big and very hard” were not the ones I wanted to hear. “Nothing of concern there,” would have been very much the preferred option: “Go home, eat chocolate and don’t worry; there is no further reason for me to go back up there” would have been nice. The knowledge that further investigation was required and that my rectum was the only available means of access did not fill the mind with joy (any more than the later realisation that it isn’t the only point of access – but that’s a different tale, for another day, after you’ve eaten.) Suffice to say that, for one reason or another, and excluding my ears, I have now had a camera inserted into every available point of access and I feel that my lights have possibly been the subject of more photographs than the zebra crossing on Abbey Road.

Initially, I did actually consider calling this little blog of mine ‘Prostate’, but I quickly realised that despite the very ragged nature of this particular not-so-little gland, it was actually going to be about so much more. It was going to be about the potential future of failing eyesight, collapsing teeth, expanding belly, trapped wind, untrapped wind, sagging knees, crap on the telly, short-term memory loss, inability to adapt, short-term memory loss and ‘Oh dear, has Mr Floppy come to play again…’ and ‘You can pack that in for a start…’ This blog is about growing old. It is about addressing fears (principally, that I might one day smell of wee) whilst embracing life. It is about being old, but it is also, I hope, about somehow finding the joy in it. And – you’ll be thrilled to hear – my prostate barely ever features…

[Enter Post Title Here]

Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA on Pexels.com

In my office – ok, I’ll come clean with you, I call it my ‘office’ but only because it has my desk and my laptop in it as well as (most importantly) my music, my books, my favourite photographs, odds and sods, trinkets, curios, and various elements of sentimental jumble (that my wife chooses to call ‘junk’), various guitars, a red ukulele, more pens than you (or anybody else for that matter) could shake a stick at, (I also have a stick), some shells, some mugs, a pair of ‘cowboy’ boots, my favourite hat, a secret stash of chocolate and a nerf gun – I have a signal booster for the internet router. Well, I say booster only because that is what it said on the box when I bought it. It was implicit. I remember it clearly. Big letters: the words ‘Signal Booster’. Nowhere did it say ‘A little plastic box that you plug in – after a set-up process that should take five minutes, but actually ages you by five years – and watch as the little green LED lights flicker listlessly for a while before turning red and switching off your entire network’, even though that is all the bloody thing actually ever does.

Not all the time, you understand. Not even regularly. Just randomly. Just after enough time has elapsed for me to forget what it was that buggered it all up last time, so that I have to go through everything again: every conceivable setting on the laptop, boot and reboot, router off/router back on, ‘What the f…?’ before remembering that all that I have to do is unplug the little plastic box, give it a minute to compose itself and then plug the bloody thing back in again. It serves to remind me that everything in my house has a Primary Function that it performs sporadically and badly, and a Secondary Function that it performs diligently and, for the most part, covertly.

To my right I have a printer that prints what I want it to print from time to time, but mostly fails to do so: that generally prints, instead, the last thing that it refused to print a week ago, without explanation or excuse: that extracts more joy than it has any right to from mashing up a perfectly decent document before splashing it down onto paper sideways and in an order that could only be explained by Alan Turing, turning it into the kind of thing that is only otherwise seen printed in the instruction booklet for a Chinese digital watch.

Below it I have a paper shredder which steadfastly refuses to shred paper, but is very happy to pass its time by reminding me not to stray anywhere near electronic gadgetry whilst wearing a necktie. It is also very efficient at puking out an acrid white smoke, specifically designed to prove that the alarms are not working.

Finally I have a piece of useless junk, just an arm’s length from my computer keyboard, that is designed to think of something entertaining to say every now and then, but mostly just stares vacantly at the screen and nicks the chocolate from my stash when it thinks I’m not looking. Tonight I gave it the task of thinking up a title for this evening’s post. It is currently wiggling a cotton bud in its ear. It is reading the instructions on the toothpaste tube. It has forgotten why it is here…

Unsubscribe Here

This is the time of year when all my guardian pigeons come home to roost.

Because December is a month in which I spend most of my time saying, ‘I’ll do it after Christmas’, January is a month filled with Insurance Renewals and Extended Warranty extensions (the capitals are my own). I watch the TV, I know that Extended Warranties (I’ve started now, so I can’t stop) are seldom worth the paper they are no longer written on, but attempting to stop the myriad purveyors of same from contacting me annually to remind me that I haven’t extended yet is something I take, on average, about 3,000 hours per domestic appliance doing. Each little ‘Cancel’ button that I cyber-press brings a ‘Did you really mean to do that?’ email, followed by a ‘Follow this link to confirm that you really, really meant to do that’, and ultimately a text assuring me that, just in case I hadn’t really wanted to do that, in case I am so mentally enfeebled that I do not understand the implications of a button marked ‘I never want to hear from you again’, they will contact me again in a year’s time to check.

The general reaction to an ‘Unsubscribe’ request is ‘Hey boys, I’ve got a live one here’ followed by yet another email to check whether I really, really wanted to do that. The whole frustrating rigmarole providing a signal to the kettle that it is time to noisily give up the ghost and trip the electrics for half the village while it is at it, thrusting all access to the internet into an inescapable wormhole and setting the little wheel on my laptop screen spinning into eternity.

Insurance policy renewals – as opposed to the five year conditional Extended Warranty on my tin opener – are not quite so easily ignored. I have learned that I must not simply allow these things to auto renew as my reward for many years of loyalty is a premium that is seriously more than that of a newbie. So, I become a newbie. I re-register every detail from my renewal notice into a new on-screen application form that tells me, after several hours searching for my birth certificate, my marriage certificate, my ‘O’ level Art certificate; measuring my floors, calculating the average pitch of roofs and counting bathrooms (within the strict definition of the policy) that I do not exist since my email address has an unauthorised integer and my phone number is too long. A simple typo of course, easily cured by an explosion of cursing and starting all over again. My eventual reward is a policy that costs me only marginally more than last year’s, but does not cover damage to ‘sanitary wares’ – particularly annoying since I am attempting to renew my car insurance – resulting in a three hour on-line ‘chat’ during which I try (unsuccessfully) to persuade an AI employee that I did not intend to insure my home ‘Third Party, Fire and Theft’.

It is a month-long task that leaves me wondering whether I should subscribe to some kind of ‘We Renew Your Policies’ website – obviously based in Moscow – that deals with it all in return for nothing more than total access to my bank account details, medical history and a promise to allow anything up to one hundred people to open credit agreements in my name. Also that I make a minimum of one kidney available for transplant on request.

But never mind. I can unsubscribe next year…

Signs of Spring

It’s strange, isn’t it, that having enjoyed such a long and balmy autumn here in the UK and despite what December threw at us, the very moment the clock ticked onto 2023, we began to look for signs of spring? It is the way we work: the more we ignore winter, the more likely it is to go away. That December froze the noses off all those sadly deluded little pieces of flora that poked them out in the unseasonably mild November, thinking that April had arrived, is of no concern to us now, because April really is closer than it was then, and the clouts that I must not cast until May is out are already in the charity bag.

I have to admit that I quite enjoy the dark nights of winter, because nothing quite matches the thrill of hauling my multi-layered body through the door that lies between icy wind and lukewarm radiators, and not being able to see for five minutes because my glasses have steamed up. Not daring to take my hat off for the fear of the kind of ‘hot aches’ in my ears that could force me to remove them with the bread knife. Not realising that I have trodden in dog crap until it has thawed out on the door mat… The coldest of the seasons does have its joys, although most of them lie in finding ways to avoid it: open fires, closed doors, hot chocolate and the kind of stew that substantially lined your arteries as a child. When else can you come inside before you take your wellies off? When else is it permissible to wear socks – although not tan leather brogues – in bed? When else is it permissible to celebrate being on the face-side of a freezing nose by sticking it in a loved one’s ear?

I am notoriously unstable on snow and ice so I’m always pleased to see the back of that threat – there is a limit to how many times I can find myself on my arse before I get fed up with it – and, like everybody else, I look forward to reducing the number of layers I am forced to wear in order to keep warm (although not, these days, the thermal vest, which has something like a two week window in August to rest and recuperate before the temperature begins to fall again). We are all happy when the thermometer climbs high enough for us to stop pretending that the central heating thermostat has broken.

The most important thing that spring brings is colour. After a brief spell of snowdrops we get daffodils, aconites, crocuses, and bluebells – all of which lighten the soul even while warning of the impending ‘You will soon have to start mowing the lawn again’ scenario. Each day the trees get greener. Each day the weeds get longer. Each day the evenings grow lighter and the threat of the barbecue season grows greater.

Time to start wishing for winter…

The Crocheted Blanket

Sometimes I gather up all of the literary bits and bobs that litter my desk, laptop and brain and stitch them all together, like the crocheted blankets of my youth and, somehow, these ill-matched, crudely conjoined conglomerations of bits and pieces often become the posts that make the most sense to me. Whether that says more about them or me is something that you alone can determine, but if I am honest, it is how most of my life comes together: light squares, dark squares, holey squares, big squares, small squares and squares that really aren’t quite square at all, just tacked together with hope, red wool, gallons of tea and stacks of custard creams. The dark squares, as long as they remain in the minority, are subsumed into the brighter whole. Viewed from an appropriate distance, like Vladimir Putin, it is just possible to pretend that they don’t exist at all. Somehow, despite them having a TOG rating equivalent to a knitted sieve and the weight of a wet sheep, under a crocheted blanket is always the warmest place to be.

It is my New Year Intention to have many fewer dark squares in my blanket, to try and cast away the concerns over all the things I cannot control. Most of the time I am little more than an interested bystander in my own affairs, let alone those of anybody else. I will enjoy everything that I can enjoy, and endure everything else just long enough for me to reach something else to enjoy. Carrying worry, like an eyelash under a contact lens, might not seem much, but it doesn’t half mess up your day. If I spend my entire life worrying about what might be, I will have no time left for what already is and, at my age, what already is, is unlikely to be augmented too much further. Things are probably just about as good as they are going to get – and when I look at just how bad they could be, that’s really not too bad at all – so that is what I am going to carry forward from now on.

It is my intention to turn my face away from politics – and more specifically those who ply it as a trade. They cannot be trusted with lives or emotions. They would do well to remember that it doesn’t matter how much you spray the air, it still smells when you’ve done a giant poo in somebody else’s bathroom. It is my hope to head into the New Year with a sunnier disposition – or at least one with less inclination towards snow at higher altitudes. I am intent upon raising my cloud level above the neckline. I am currently working on a project that, aside from a little skill in setting ducks in rows, requires nothing from me other than writing funny lines and throwing ideas around with somebody who makes me laugh almost all of the time, and that makes me very happy. I realise that it is extremely bad form to laugh at your own jokes, but is it ok to smile at the fact that you can still make them?

My crocheted Blog Blanket has been on the go for over four years now, and I hope that most of it keeps you warm. I enjoy the routine it gives me and occasionally the odd little patterned doily I produce. I have decided that I must not fret too much about the occasional dropped stitch as long as, on the whole, the entire tatty, harlequin poncho manages to keep most of the cold out.

Now, what have I done with that old yarn?…

In the Wee Small Hours…

You know the kind of nights when you can’t stop your brain from working? They usually coincide with those nights when you have the sudden realisation of age; when you can not only feel, but (if you close your eyes) actually see time slipping away; when you are convinced that your heart is joining in on a Neil Peart drum solo and that the small, previously innocuous mole on your forehead has become, in the scant few hours of tortured unrest, the size and colour of a cumquat. It’s funny, isn’t it, that something that is so difficult to rouse at 6am becomes impossible to switch off at 2am? Is it right that you should have to plead for sleep with the contents of your own head? And what so preoccupies the synapses that they refuse to close down? Well last night, for me, was the realisation that I had spent the entire day in Monday’s socks.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I was wearing the same socks as I wore two days ago, nor indeed that I had a pair set aside specifically for that day. No, it is simply that I have a set of socks – fourteen in total – that are marked with the days of the week and whilst I find that useful when balling up pairs, I seldom look at the days when I wear them. At midnight it occurred to me that I should. Why? Well simply in case somebody should assume that I am the kind of person who ensures that his socks tell the correct day when he slips them on and therefore that I have been wearing the same pair for three days. Who might that be? I have no idea. I have no plans to take my shoes off anywhere but home, but when my mind decides that there is a possibility to be had, there is no way to dissuade it.

Until it starts to think about pants.

Now I don’t have pants with the days of the week on them (that would be madness). I don’t have pants with anything on them, but it did occur to me that I had been wearing a pair of pants all day that, coincidentally matched, exactly, the colour of my (on the face of it) three-day old socks, which left open the possibility that anyone having seen my pant/sock combo (I have racked my brain to think of somebody, but to no avail) might deduce that I always go for matching and – having caught full-sight of the logo on my socks – that my pants too were therefore forty eight hours past their prime.

So, I resolved that, in future, when wearing my day of the week socks I would endeavour to ensure that I always wore them on the appropriate day and, furthermore, that I would match them with pants of the same colour in order to make it clear that both were changed on a regular basis.

Except that I was not at all certain that I have seven pairs of pants that match the socks and there was no way that I could check because a) my wife was asleep, b) the drawer squeals when opened and groans when shut, c) the bedroom was (it now being 1am) pitch black, d) my bedside lamp which contains the dimmest bulb in the known Universe, becomes a searchlight in the middle of the night and e) my wife really doesn’t like being woken by my bedside light in the wee small hours. The only thing I could do was to attempt some kind of stocktake in my head, but I became distracted by the olive waistband/burgundy welt/burgundy waistband/olive welt conundrum and I could think of no way of solving it without laying them all out physically in a line and matching them up. At 2am? No, of course I didn’t.

I did it at six, when I got up…

Old Man/New Year

For those of you who have been around long enough to formulate the question, but not long enough to have gleaned the answer, I will myself embark upon the New Year Blogging Schedule by addressing the conundrum that I know will be occupying your holiday brains: why do my blogs so rarely tackle the issues of the day? Well, it is because what is topical on the days that I write these little nosegays seldom remains so by the time I publish. Time moves on and I post so far in arrears that it has often left the building before I get round to hitting the button. So, New Year/New Man etc etc and so on, here’s what I intend to do about it. Henceforth I will collect all my ‘musings’ (I hope you will excuse the word – propriety will not allow me to use the word that is closer to the truth) into two piles: General Twaddle and Topical Nonsense, the contents of the latter, I will be able to drop into the stream of the former like a turd into the Thames. It will be seamless: you will not spot the joins – even when a general topic suggests itself to me mid-topical rant, I will be able to accommodate it by instigating a third pile, a ‘somewhere between mis-understood topical issues and palpable tosh’ pile, which would occupy the space heretofore occupied by The Sun.

Today’s little time-waster is itself almost topical – a chance to wish you all a happy, peaceful and primarily healthy New Year – but already I have managed to drop a full day behind. I am no great fan of the New Year Celebrations – it makes me too aware that the years that lay ahead are very much fewer than those that lie behind – and it takes me until today to resign myself to the bloody-minded rationalities of the year ahead. First among them is my birthday. I am 64 years old today. In the days of my youth, that would have put me just one year shy of my pension (and judging from those at that time around me, probably two years from death) but what it does today is make me wonder exactly when it will be that I actually start to feel my age. When I was a boy, men of the age I am now had worked much harder and for much longer than I have. Most of them had fought in the war. Women had kept the home fires burning, brought up the kids, controlled the purse-strings, managed house and home and husband and lived with the knowledge that they deserved far more than the second-class status that they then endured. They had definitely all earned the right to feel a whole lot older than I do today: old enough for a young Paul McCartney to assume that 64 was as close to ‘end of life’ as it gets.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I do not feel like a spring chicken – probably just as well given the current avian flu situation – I start every morning with an array of pills that serve to remind me that my blood pressure and my cholesterol levels are not at all what they should be and that the little time-bomb inside my prostate is still ticking, but I don’t actually feel anything like as old as I expected to and I worry that this just could be the year when it all drops in on me.

I’m doing what I can, but I don’t want to allow staying alive to take precedence over being alive. What I most desire from this year is that I can end it in the same kind of fettle as I head into it and that the world, itself, is still there for me to be part of on my 65^th birthday. It’s not too much for an old man to wish for is it?

Anyway, I wish you a Happy (belated) New Year one and all. May your God/Boss/Wife/Mistress/Children (delete as appropriate) grant your every wish.