To wit to woo two oh two oh uh-oh oh no na na na na hey hey hey #narrowboat #boating #boatsthattweet

It’s the oneth of the oneth – time for my shower, and a change of underwear.

Then I’ll don my (synthetic) leathers and go for a long, hard ride on my hover-bike.

Perhaps I shall fly me to the Moon and back. It’s good to check in with the colonies every once in a while, but Mars is a little too far for a pleasure-jaunt, I’ll take the boat there later in the week.

Where is the Jetsons lifestyle that I was promised?

The first sunrise of this new Human Calendar year, and splendid it is too. The Met Office predicted grey and gloom, and indeed that’s what we got to begin with, then Mr Sunshine put in an appearance with a backdrop of a slightly dodgy, hazy blue sky. Who knows? My solar panels may feed yet. Feed, little ones, feed.

There is …weather… on the horizon, and the table may be cleared sooner than wished.

Ah, yes – I had wondered where the B*stard Universe was in all of this. Briefly absent, it seems. No sooner had I typed the previous paragraph than the sunshine was extinguished, the blue dispensed with and we returned to a clouded twilight barely strong enough to keep the vampires in their coffins.

Oh well, it was pleasant while it lasted, and one mustn’t grumble. The local git of a swan didn’t grumble. This is a shame, for liking swans as I do I had hoped that some Lord of The Manor had enjoyed Swan-au-Vin or Swan Wellington or some such for his mid-winter feast.

Perhaps Swan Fingers with chips and garden peas, or Swan-on-Toast or Swan & Kidney Pie, or any one of the other decent and respectable uses for these creatures.

But no. Of course not. Swan intactus. Swan vitae.

Swan Vesta.

New Years Eve, I hear you cry. What of it? I arranged mine next to a blazing Mr Stove and with a dazzling combination for entertainment;

I began and finished re-reading The Body in the Library, and I have plenty of the amber nectar remaining with which to accompany The Moving Finger, A Murder is Announced and the 4:50 from Paddington, at my leisure.

At midnight I woke to the Sounds of The Somme, drew the blinds and watched the fireworks displays on the horizon. Not bad. Thank you, Nantwich, thank you Crewe.

The day today may well have turned dullen-grey (a Government shade, much in evidence in England these days) but I remain proud of my solar panels. They gather all that may be gathered, and we do our best by the Battery Twins (the Cardinal and I get by on two 135Ah domestics, and a certain economy of design of use). A battery-temperature-adjusted “float state” for twelve out of the previous thirty days in the depths of the solar winter season, not bad, and all reasonably spaced for the best chemical health that might be expected, all things considered, even if all things not equal.

I think that today, though, we’ve had all that we’re going to get from the magic.

So, a new Human Calendar year, eh? What shall we all do with it, I wonder.

What would Miss Marple do with it?

Take a spot of whisky with her breakfast, probably, and then shoot the Vicar.

Wherever you are, no matter how peculiar you are, do, please, have a splendid twenty-twenty. 🙂 Peace, love, goodwill and do have a cigar, to a significant proportion of you all. As to the rest, well, to paraphrase Mr John George Haigh, if you’re not in solution by the end of the year then you’ll still be part of the problem.

We live, as ever, in interesting times. This is a mystery too, since those who affect, effect and generally feature themselves in these times are the least interesting folk to have ever bellowed “feed me” on this planet. Father Nature has a distinctly acid sense of humour – sixty thousand years of rabid behavioural evolution, and then the human species considers itself somehow “led” by, well – pick a public “name”, any name! The Society of the Human Species has, by and large, modelled itself on a duck-billed platypus walking backwards, looking constantly over its shoulder and illuminating its way by lighting its own farts. One poorly-timed hiccough and the reversed pressure will suck in the vapours and we’ll blow ourselves to bits, one unfortunately-timed sneeze and we’ll blast-incinerate the whole jungle.

You’ve got to laugh.

No, seriously, its the law.

Chin-chin.

Ian H., and Cardinal W.