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Hello there. It’s really the height of bad manners to start a little blog and then to leave it empty, isn’t it? It might be almost February, but allow me to be so louche at this late point in proceedings as to wish you a happy new year.

It was a bad start – on my first day back to work I fell down the stairs, forgot to put a belt on my trousers and left my office pass on the dining table. But it can only improve from there, right? I feel the same about the weather. It’s important to start January as the calendar ticks over with gloomy nights and endlessly inclement weather, because at least the good times lie ahead.

Or at least I hope they do. Sometimes I feel like I have already crested life’s rollercoaster and begun plunging towards my eventual demise. It’s all looking down from here. I have no resolutions in this year of our Lord two thousand and twenty three, because allow me my bad habits and harmless petty indulgences in this short time I have left. Melodramatic maybe, but I can easily start to understand how a mid-life crisis germinates and takes hold. It all makes me want to get a motorbike, only I’m too much of a coward and I’d probably fall off it.