Every so often, LinkedIn prompts my connections to congratulate me on a work anniversary, which is nice (thanks Kenny). The funny thing is, though, it happens several times a year and never on the same date. What are they up to? So I take it with a pinch of salt. If they sent me a gold watch or offered to pay for a year-long sabatical so I could go and study the sand grains on the beaches of the Seychelles, now that would be welcome. Instead, it’s just reminders that life hasn’t moved on.

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The strange chip shop phenomena continue. Following my uncanny pavlovian experience of a couple of weeks ago, New York Brian messaged me asking if I was ever planning to make ‘saveloy’ Word of the Week. I replied that Saveloyhad already been Word of the Week, way back in 2017, to which he shot back, “What about Sausage in Batter?”
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As part of my New Year effort to stave off the ravages of old age, I’ve started going to yoga classes. I booked in with my wife for a session called Warm Dynamic Flow, which sounded pretty soothing to me but wasn’t.

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I don’t know if it’s a start of the year thing, but this week I’ve been experiencing some strange psychological phenomena. For example, on Wednesday evening I went to my local chippy to get dinner and found it shut. That wasn’t the strange part – they often go back to Turkey for the month of January – so I walked away and focused instead on making a sausage sandwich. That’s not particularly noteworthy either, but wait. It gets better.

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Happy New Year, one and all! As is traditional at this time of year, I’ve been evaluating my day-to-day existence, checking it’s all still worth it and trying to identify new incentives for getting out of bed in the morning and squeezing a few fresh drops of meaning out of this oversized lemon called life.

This involves letting go of a few dreams. I’ve had to concede, for example, that last New Year’s campaign to make 2024 the year we all “Say Si to Sherry” was not a success. Maybe this year.

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It’s funny the things that keep you awake at night. Mostly it’s fear. Or the cat. Or fear of the cat. But often it can be the most banal of thoughts, such as ‘What is it that fish actually smell of?’ and ‘What do you call those hard bits on the ends of shoelaces?’

Yep, some people’s minds really do work that way.
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There’s a school of thought that says that everybody, no matter what sort of life you’re born into nor how lazy you are, has a talent for something. But what if that something came and went in a fleeting moment, without you having time to bottle it and take it to the world? What then of life?

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I’m not normally one to complain about mortality. Life’s too short. But this week I’ve been suffering with a chronic ailment that has seriously tested my will to live. There are many cruel pranks that life has played on me over the years, but none more sadistic than the hilarious double whammy of a susceptibility to sinusitis and a lisp.

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I know the 1970s are often romanticised as a halcyon age of strikes and power cuts and bad jumpers, but there was a refreshing simplicity about life back then. For example, somebody who lived by the belief that he or she was more important and lovely than everyone else was called a selfish or self-centred git. Short, straightforward, we all knew where we stood.

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One of the consequences of it having rained non-stop for the last two years is that there’s been a bumper crop of fruit this year. I’ve had so many apples I’ve run out of recipes and am having to make clothes out of them. The socks are good but the trousers are a bit clingy.

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