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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The more observant among you will have noticed that the last three words have been Abbreviation, Administration and Application, in that order. “What’s he doing, writing a dictionary?” Nope, it’s pure chance. But there is a common theme: my friend Nick, who has become something of a muse.

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A couple of weeks ago I told you about my friend Nick and his somewhat old manish ranting about the modern day proliferation of abbreviations like ‘admin’. He was digging weeds at the time, an expression that another friend, Andrew – who also likes to pick up on things that other people might deem unworthy of their time – called into question. “Surely the term is ‘weeding’?” he argued.

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My designer friend Nick, who designed the book of this very blog (available in all good book shops, in Bell Street, Reigate – although they may have sold it by now), was out digging weeds this week when he fell down a rabbit hole. I’m talking about a metaphorical rabbit hole. Nick is a standard size bloke and wouldn’t fit down a real rabbit hole.

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The recent couple of weeks of sunshine – what we in England call ‘summer’ – has left the water level down a bit in my garden pond. Apparently a pond evaporates by about one inch per day in hot weather, but topping it up from the hose defeats the natural object. So I was excited by this week’s downpours because I thought they’d do the job for me. That’s when I noticed a baffling physical phenomenon that you might be able to help me with.

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