more on politics.

Apparently, David Cameron feels that he 'can turn this country round'. I bet he does - turn it round so he can screw it up the backside, like the last time the Tories were in. The Conservatives have apparently identified six key areas to campaign on, beginning with the deficit. What they do not have is any clue of a coherent political or economic strategy. And you can tell Cameron is a man out of ideas when he says:
"It is an election we have a patriotic duty to win because this country is in a complete and utter mess, and we have to sort it out."
A patriotic duty?
To paraphrase Swift, 'Patriotism is the last refuge of the politically clueless'.
Cock. Total cock.

Headline of the year?

Even though it's only February? And yes, it is for real:
Butler Handjob gives Wheatley Semi
It's about someone giving away a quarter final by handball, of course. What did you think?

Ill.

I feel terrible. I have a rough bloody cough and no energy whatsoever, plus blocked up ears. Just thought I'd give it a mention.

The Tory Imagination Isn't Working....

as I said in my last post, devoid of ideas.
Forgive the crappiness of my picture editing skills.

faffing round.

I'm just fiddling round with this at present. How many times do we actually do that - fiddling round? I'd say the vast majority of life, our working/study lives included, is a load of faffing round. Only the rare few actually bother to concentrate and work hard enough, and then for not entirely honest reasons. The latter refers to the majority of politicians and sneery-faced slimeballs who work in the city. What do you think - wouldn't life be better for politicians and financial analysts who were a little more laid back?
Actually, it sounds, on the face of it, a little counter-productive: after all, we elect politicians to dictate our daily lives and trust bankers to guard our wealth, and so we should expect them to be upright, honest and irreproachable - very much like priests, in fact. Or gods or something. And, when they behave like the humans they actually are, we get all spluttered and outraged, when in fact there is collective fault, and a terrible number of errors within the system.
Let's start with politics. Now, a politician should in fact refer to anyone involved in 'politics', i.e. 'the affairs of the city' - in other words, everyone. what we live in is not in fact a democracy - rather, it is an elective dictatorship, where political decisions, for the sake of expedience, are given to a minority of people to make. And of course, a certain type of person understands this, manipulates it to his or her own ends, and gets duly elected. By 'understand this', I mean the fact that the vast majority of people can't be arsed to think for themselves and involve themselves in their own communities. These are often the same people who whine about the politicians they have installed. It's the way that the Blairs and Camerons get elected. However, there is a difference between these two very modern titans of political rectitude - the former just wanted to be loved by the audience, and duly pulled out rabbit after policy rabbit from his magician's hat, while the latter is a bland copy who is seen as a safe face by those who bankroll him.
And talking of bankroll, let us look at the financial market. What this really shares with politics is the atmosphere in which it operates; a febrile, crazed miasma in which each decision must be instant, kneejerk, unconsidered. We somehow expect our bankers and politicians to take calm, measured, and considered decisions, yet when one looks at the bearpits of Westminster and The City, it is absolutely clear that this cannot possibly be the case. And of course, when you put your average, typical person in such a heated atmosphere, how can we expect them to react?
Yup.
Let's face it - we get the politicos and bankers we deserve.

far too long

..between posts. well, yes, I know, I posted yesterday, but you know what I mean. Sheer Inertia has hindered me - the torpid, leaden weight of Not Doing that stops me from doing a thing. That and watching crap movies on the telly.
There is also the problem I have of wondering what this blog is actually for - after all, it's not as though I have a huge readership - and thinking, is this just another way of distracting myself from all the other things i could profitably be doing?
the main other thing being writing, and that's something I'm not actually doing at present, much to my chagrin. Why, I can't begin to say: there seems to be far too much pointlessness to things at present.
Then again, there are things to bemoan: the government's new rules on student visas, for example, which threaten to put me out of a job. A brilliant example of really poorly thought out legislation, by people who don't even begin to understand what language acquisition and learning mean, and don't care, just as they can keep The Little Brown People out. totally unquestionably racist: if I'd wanted to elect the BNP potato scum into government, I wish I'd been informed of the fact that Labour had gone all Nazi beforehand.
Talking of elections, there's one up and coming, and anoter cause of depression. Who to vote for? there's Brown, the imprisoned beleaguered bear; Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem Homunculus; or David Cameron. The best that can be said for this man is that he's a cut price Tony Blair, sans the 'sincerity' and fake empathy, a man who fell out of the middle pages of a Daily Mail editorial; a man who hasn't had enough time to go morally bankrupt, yet is so utterly hollow that one could, to quote Conrad, poke a hole quite through him and find nothing within save a little dirt. And anyone voting for this fool would be even worse that hollow.
rant over and out for now.

just trying something with Picasa. Normal service, by which I mean actually writing on this damn blog, to resume soon.

Diaries.

I'm passing this blog over to me,from twenty years ago:

Sunday, 26th November, 1989
Well, here it is, the first entry in this diary! At least, I hope it is going to become a regular occurence. It's about time I got down to some writing, and perhaps by doing this each day (or whatever), it'll instil some literary discipline in me. Today is a sharp, bright morning, a contrast to the blotchy, semi-forgotten haze of last night. Outside, the air is as sharp as the teeth of some small vicious animal, and the frost makes everything spangle briefly in thebrilliant but ailing winter sun. The house, however, is warm, like a loved jumper, except for the kitchen, whose cool atmosphere reminds me of a wintry toilet seat one would rather not sit on. Next door has been emanating a considerable deal of shouting again, most of it issuing from the sewage-infested gob of the drunken harridan. Still, she's leaving. I pity the people who're going to be her next door neighbours. She herself is really rather sad: V. lonely, I think, likes the bottle demons even more than I do, screwing a chap of dubious quality young enough to be her son. Then again, she did marry a psychoanalyst. Perhaps it's to be expected. No getting away from it, divorce is a messy thing. Affected us bad enough.
The pub was the same old boring thing, the same old drunken stench of nicotine and beer. I really don't know why I bother going up there: I know what it's going to be like , everybody sitting around drinking , sayng very little. There'll be that little weasel R, snickering and smirking, playing cocky and laddish; there's SC, trying the best he can to work out the vagaries and dumb chances of the world; IP, angry and silent, thinking where he might have gone wrong with women, trying to keep his sullen calmness; DT, fat and cheerful, a regular loadsamoney type, who doesn't give a damn about the future and continues merrily with the three basics, eating, drinking and shagging.
Then there is all the rest of that merry crowd and always the smell of violence, just waiting to erupt. You can feel it: a presence as tangible as cigarette smoke. I hope I'm not there when it happens, 'cos it's going to be one hell of a scrap. Still, it's a place to drink. I just miss the university bar conversations, that's all. It was such a relief to see Eunice the other saturday. All that had been bottled up inside came spilling out, and I could get a load off my chest. Hopefully I'll see her before long. In the meantime, I really should be writing! There is this poetry competition, I've got four days in which to write a poem and send it off in the vain hope of getting £5,000, which I could do with right now. I can't think of anything else to write at present, so I'll sign off. One thing I've noticed over the past few hundred words is the change in my writing style. Normally, when I'm writing to friends, I'll write in a far more open and flamboyant manner, rather like this, but as in this, I notice my writing more resembles some frantic spidery crawling over the page. Oh well.

Bloody hell. the past is truly a foreign country.
However, I can still identify some aspects that remain the same. One thing that makes me laugh is how much I had my eye on future publishing opportunities - the references to a back story and so on.

mnurg. I feel a)ill, and b)knackered. In particular, my shoulders ache, as if I've been carrying a heavy weight all day. It's become far more noticeable to me that certain parts of me ache far more if I don't sleep properly, noticeably my legs. Since I was woken at 3 a.m. by Nur coming to bed, then by Sean an hour and a half later, after which I couldn't sleep, you can imagine how I felt at 6.30.
Getting older seems to be a mixed blessing: on one hand, I can see far more clearly the fears and errors that made my younger life so much harder, and where necessary act upon them - by which I mean, I do not need to be ruled by those fears. On the other hand, I have become acutely aware of the slow physical accretion of age - eyesight getting blurred every now and then, reaction times on the slide, injuries taking just that little bit longer to heal, and the utterly galling appearance of myself in the mirror in the morning when I can see increasingly wider patches of pink skin gleaming through my hair. It's a bugger.

Here Come The Girls - run for your life!

I'm going to return in this post to one of my favourite topics - adverts. I've shyed from this subject for a while, simply because The Guardian Guide does demolition jobs on them so well. In a way, I feel writing on the same or similar topic feels just like aping, even though it's a tried and tested literary thing. Now, of course Advertistan is a fairly easy target, comprised as it is of stereotypes, models, cliches, fantasies, lazy thinking and fatuous claims, all played out under an eternal sunshine, but it's a sunday evening after a long tiring day and I can't be arsed aiming at anything else. Besides, I just want to put my own point of view on something.
The object of my ire is Boots' 'Here come the girls' advert. OK, it was a memorable ad a couple of years ago, but this year's version (and the scary thing is that this campaign seems destined to run and run) pokes a finger through the thin membrane of what we laughingly call reality and finds nothing inside, save a little dirt (apologies to Joseph Conrad for that stretching of a phrase). In other words, it's totally unrealistic. Here's the premise: an elderly couple are having a meal in an otherwise abandoned restaurant, possibly Italian. Next to them is a large table, clearly reserved. Suddenly, in burst a group of what are mainly women, obviously on an office do. I say mainly, as there does appear to be at least one bloke among them. They give each other gifts. One of the women is pregnant, and gets a gift of two 'In the Night Garden' hand puppet, to which all the women coo. the token bloke gets a beard clipping kit, the waiter (Italian? Greek? Spanish? but clearly Good-Looking Dopey Foreign Bloke) gets a present, even the elderly couple who have had to endure all the festive bonhomie on the table next to them get presents. The waiter gets a note from one of the women. Then all the girls march out, arms linked and four abreast, singing 'Here come the girls'.
And it's bollocks because?
Not a single one of them is honking, screaming, gorilla-butt drunk.
In reality, they'd all be off their tits on lambrini and Bailey's and vodka and Cava ('cos that's class). They'd be throwing food round the restaurant. Two of them, previously best of friends, would be beating seven shades of shit out of each other, while The Fat Ugly One With Chafing Issues would be seeking to be the peacemaker. The Mousey One would have trapped the Token Office Bloke in a corner, earnestly telling him about her cat and her stash of chocolates and her box collection of Ally McBeal and her mum who calls her up twice a day, while trying to relieve him of his trousers. Meanwhile, two of the really fat office ladies would have Good-Looking Dopey Foreign Bloke pinioned down in some dark corner of the restaurant, doing and suggestig unspeakable acts. Finally, they'd all stagger out, chanting 'here come the girls' while any men with any sense would flee for their lives. and trousers. Then our troop would move into the nearest nightclub to cop off with blokes called Wayne, or Carl, or Danno.
And this is why Advertistan is crap.

Huh. It's been one of those days.
I took Sean shopping and decided to withdraw some money from the cash machine. Just after slipping the card in, I noticed that there was something awry with the thing - the screen was out of kilter and the plastic slot where the card feeds in and out looked like it had been battered. After I requested my dosh, the machine tried to spit my card out, but the thing got stuck. After frantically trying to rescue it, the machine, with a final high-pitched 'beep' swallowed it. I swore, then went to complain to the customer services.
'well, we can't touch it, because it belongs to the bank, not us', replied the customer service bod. 'It's done that to several people now'.
'So why haven't you put a sign on it warning people not to use it?'
'Oh, we're not allowed to do that, because the machine doesn't belong to us'.
After a couple of minutes' spluttering on my behalf, I managed to get the duty manager to promise to put one up.
I went home, nearly running out of petrol on the way, in order to pick up my chequebook. It was only after I'd got home that I realised that was no use, as I now didn't have a cheque guarantee card, it now nestling safely in the metal bosom of a dodgy ATM. So, shopping done on the credit card instead.
I had intended to start my crimbo shopping as well this week, in a bold attempt to break with my past habit of flailing around lethargically until the last minute.
And now it's raining.
Bah.

The road to Hell...

...is paved with good intentions. 'I meant to do this', or 'I didn't mean to do that', or more often 'well, that's totally buggered - how'd that happen?'
In fact you could say that the road to Istanbul is paved with good intentions. One thing that you can never level at Turkish people is that they mean or selfish. I've never met people who are so willing to go out of the way to help, even if it means considerable personal discomfort or inconvenience for themselves. The problem is that no matter how good the intention, the execution of the act seems to go totally tits up. Often this is no fault of the person offering to do the good deed: Generally speaking, Istanbul seems to contrive its own ways of ensuring that the best laid plans of mice and men get torn up, eaten, thrown up and flushed down the Bog of Fate, simply because it feels like it. However, there is also the fact that people say they'll do something, as they feel obliged to, and don't actually think about how they will do the act - which leads to all kinds of totally screwed-up episodes. The daftest thing is that it leads to all sorts of extravagant lies in order to justify something, or the lack of something happening.

The most common one involves estimates of times it takes to get anywhere. If someone says, 'it'll take us 20 minutes to get to Sisli', you should, being pragmatic, allow at least an extra hour to get there. And, while you are either stewing in a marinade of humid heat and petrol fumes or shivering at a foul, miserable and rainy day, the driver will inevitably say something along the lines of 'well, just yesterday, it only took me fifteen minutes to get here...', and to be honest, this should be accepted as the good-natured bullshit that it really is. I think it's one thing that British people really don't get - this need to lie to cover up organisational screw-ups, and to have them accepted for what they are.During my recent foray to Istanbul, I'd totally forgotten this aspect to the culture, and so spent a large chunk of the time simmering with anger and frustration at things ot working. It's not as if anyone deliberately set out to bugger up the holiday - everyone was full of the best intentions: it's just everything got buggered in one way or another.
Actually, we Brits are just as bad. We're full of good intentions: We're just better at covering up the reasons for buggering things up, such as The Wrong Type Of Leaves, or Adverse Financial Conditions. In other words, we create an official reason for things going all crap, as it were, rather than relying on an informal and far more inventive way of explaining why things haven't gone as planned.
I suppose that we all have our own cultural-specific ways of buggering things up.

ride the horse.

Apologies for not posting for so long. The truth is, I just haven't felt like writing anything, and I haven't had the will to, either. Each time I've opened the 'new post' page, I've stared at the screen and slunk off like a man with a pocketful of air, staring at the shop window display at the things he wants to buy. Still, I want to get back into the saddle, so I may as well start from wherever I can and go on, even if that leaves me sounding like a disjointed drunk on a soap crate.
I've felt myself getting more and more frustrated recently - the outcome of several things, I suspect: Coming to the end of a very intense period of work, worries about the increasingly rudderless senior management at my workplace and what that may mean for my job, worries caused by the credit crunch and what it's doing to my money, worry about money itself and the perennial difficulties about saving, mild depression engendered by the fact that the next Prime Minister will be a tory version of Tony Blair, a smooth-faced careerist with his eye on the main chance, a mountebank pretending to Care with a capital C, worries, worries. Plain and simple I feel anxious!
Yet when I just focus on the now, I should really wonder what it is that I'm worried about - after all, I do have all the perceived trappings of having a good life, along with my health, most of my hair etc etc - from an external perspective, so far, so great. However, I can't help but focus on the future - in fact, it's always been a thing with me, to ignore the jam today and fret about famine tomorrow. And then, of course, I look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.
I am beginning to think that it's time to move on, career-wise, and not necessarily stay in teaching. I haven't moved at all in several years, and all that seems to be happening now is that more and more work is being laded on with little or no reward of any kind. But what should I do next?

wine and computers - just say no.

Buggeration. My netbook (an Advent 4211) decided to have a drink last saturday - a nice refreshing glass of red wine. While I managed to turn it upside down fast enough - well, you don't want good wine to go to waste - the keyboard's buggered, so now I'm writing using a cheap old USB keyboard. So far, the only replacement I've managed to find costs £32, for a component that probably costs only a fiver. And I can't find the receipt for the computer, so I can't get anything done under warranty. Bugger.

a new toy for word fans

I was pointed in the direction of Wordle, and wondered what would happen if I put my 2004 novel into it.

Lacunae

I'm in the midst of a lacuna - and no, that's not a make of car. Having finished doing my Diploma in Teaching in the lifelong learning sector (DTLLS) and my Level 5 ESOL Specialist Qualification, and currently waiting for the results, I feel at something of a loose end. Even though I'm still busy at work and have plenty to do, I can't help but feel that I'm not doing enough, and I don't seem to have any interest in anything. hence the reason I feel that this is a lacuna - a break between things, a pause between actions.
In fact, it would be easy to say that my life is one long story of frenetic bursts of activity followed by lengthy periods of torpor, longeurs if you will (they're certainly not shorteurs). For some reason, once any given period of intense activity ends, I find it immensely difficult to become engaged with something new, or the next phase of a project. I'm damned if I know why, either: it's not for the sake of my health. One thing that becomes immediately apparent once I finish something is that I become extremely irritable, bad-tempered and generally depressed. My assumption on this is that this is probably a result of an alteration in brain chemistry - I suspect that the stress of an intense work project makes me produce a shedload of endorphins, and once the pressure is off, production subsides, leaving me feeling as I do - withdrawal? If it's the case that I feel so crap after finishing something perhaps it leads me to feel reluctant to move on to the next thing.
What is always worrying is the fact that it takes me so damn long to move on to that next thing. I'm far happier working hard than not - so why these breaks in the action? And, as you can see, it means that I don't write on this thing as often as I would like. Forgive the most recent lacuna.

What are you thinking?

"what are you thinking?"...
The car zoomed down country lanes last sunday. I looked out of the window as a gated estate was flung behind us, a quick glance at an advert - 'new development exclusively for over-55's only!' - and thought how the self-imposed ghettoization of a group, in this case of a specific age group rather than an ethnic, religious or cultural group, while seemingly desirable at first glance, is actually more likely to foment more overarching cultural problems. for the subgroup in question, of course sticking together seems to be ideal - any given community that shares a relatively common set of ideals tends to be healthier and longer-lived, according to several statistical studies - yet this leads to the identification of any other given subgroup within society as a whole as 'the other', as Sinfield sublimely investigated in his exploration of Shakespeare's plays, following on from other studies. In other words, these putative 55+ - year-olds would typify anyone below the age of twenty as aggressive little thugs, and the same under-20s would typify them as doddery old fools, feebly waving sticks from behind the compound gates.
This lead on to consideration of how we tend to identify various social groups as 'the other' , and ascribe all our social ills to them, and then to how it is that true evil begins when we see our fellow humans as nothing more than numbers or units or selling markets. This in turn made me consider the unit cost for a pair of jeans in Primark, and wondering how much of that final retail cost actually reaches the person who made the things - considering that a pair of jeans there costs about £7, it's highly likely that virtually bugger all gets to the person in whose sweat they were made. In other words, I perpetuate what is effectively a slave system whenever I buy cheap clothes.
Zooming down the road, impatiently overtaking a Rover (how do I know it's a Rover?) I remark upon the wonderful fresh green of the trees, a miracle of chlorophyll, and think how they will become a darker green thanks to a pigmement that renders the wonderful reds and ambers of autumn; then I consider the fact that, before the advent of the high-speed steam engine, somewhere in the middle of the Victorian period, no-one had ever travelled faster than 25 miles per hour, apart from those unfortunate few who'd managed to fall off a sufficiently high cliff, and even then they wouldn't have been able to reach the average terminal velocity for a falling human body. A couple of phrases from Milton then intruded, then, for no discernible reason, Andrew Marvell's 'the garden', followed by a snatch of The Ancient Mariner...
...and my answer?
'Oh, nothing'.

Brilliant bike ride!

While my sister was puffing and panting round London in the marathon (and getting a perfectly respectable time), I decided to go out for a ride on the bike. The weather was utterly perfect: sky a wonderful bright bluey silver, the temperature just about right, the landscape filled with the freshest, brightest green you could imagine - it was about as close as it is imaginable to cycling through Heaven. With added alpacas. I cycled past this farm outside Whitchurch and had to do a double take - I thought the farmer might have been exceptionally cruel to his sheep at first glance, but then realised he'd shrunk his llamas. as I was scooting down the lane, thinking it couldn't possibly get more bucolic, it did - two boys with stripped willow switches were walking three bullocks down the lane! After that, I passed a wonderfully pastoral scene involving sheep, then woods with bluebells and bright blue skies.
It wasn't a long trip - only twenty miles or so - but it was utterly wonderful. The only shame was that no-one else was tagging along with me.
And of course, the next day, it was absolutely tipping it down and I found my rear tyre flat as a pancake, and somehow I'm managed to run out of tyre cement and couldn't repair the thing.
pictures: Mapledurham House, with added cows; Alpacas; sheep being pastoral; bluebells; English woodland doing an impersonation of rainforest.
(edit) sorry, forgot to say the route - started out, went over Balmore Park, down to the Thames, went as far as Kennet Mouth, changed my mind, followed the Kennet to the town centre, cycled back to the Thames, went to Caversham Bridge, then through St Peter's and down through the Warren, off to Mapledurham, then followed the Bridlepath to Whitchurch; following that, went up the hill until the turning for Goring Heath, through there and past The Sun pub, then uphill and through the forest past the King Charles Head, then up to the Mapledurham crossroads and back home.
(another edit) I've added the route on here from Google Earth.

something in my ear.

I seem to be suffering more than usual from tinnitus, a perpetual buzzing and ringing in my ears. For starters, it's ongoing to the extent that it makes it dfficult to fall asleep and secondly, it seems remarkably loud - to me, anyway. I've had it at this time of year for quite a few years now, and I suspect that it's possibly due to having spent the best part of the previous few months in rooms made arid by central heating. It's probably something to do with ear wax. What seems different this year is the sheer persistence of the damn thing, and the fact that each ear seems to be slightly different - my left ear is a high-pitched whistle, while the right is more of a ringing sound. It's bloody annoying.
More annoying, however, is having a tune lodged in one's head. The German phrase for it translates as 'earworm' - a persistent piece of music repeating itself ad nauseam. For some reason, the current earworm is Beyonce's 'All the Single Ladies' (Aka 'If you liked it you should have put a ring on it'). It's annoying because a) it's a catchy repetitive rhythm, but mostly because b) it's a load of infantile drivel. It'sthe kind of song that you just know some dickwit of a DJ in a nightclub would put on just after Gloria Gaynor's 'I will survive' and just before the Weather Girls' 'It's raining men'. It's the kind of stuff a bunch of drunk women, one or two of whom have just split up from boyfriends/husbands/feckless idiots, dance to: the first song with defiant faces put on, the second whooping it up, the third celebrating drunkenly - just before the Dumped (Dumpee?)/Dumper breaks down in tears, mascara and Chardonnay-flavoured vomit.

What really pisses me off about Beyonce's song is the notion it implies: that a woman is only fulfilled by becoming engaged/married ('If you liked it you should have put a ring on it'), thus reducing one half of humanity to the status of chattel. It's demeaning and thoroughly infantilising, and the singer should be thoroughly ashamed of herself, if she has an ounce of intellect.
And the damn thing is still buzzing round my head.

"Farewell to the flesh"

Today is Shrove Tuesday, and, befittingly, I am stuffed on pancakes. I was discussing this with my students this morning - it being Pancake Day, that is, not my being stuffed - and we looked at traditions in verious other countries. The Polish contingent mentioned feasting on herrings, while the Germans mentioned the carnivals in various towns, in particular the one in Cologne that begins in november and continues until today. The Italian student mentioned perhaps the grandaddy of all these public festivals, the Venice Carnival, and she mentioned the festivities, the costumes and the riot of licence that pervades it.
The word 'carnival' derives from the latin Carne Vale - literally, 'goodbye to meat', or less prosaically as I have titled this post. It is the last chance before Lent to have a blowout, a bit of a party, a bit of fun, before the forty days of fasting and penitence that is Lent. It might seem strange to have a period of abstinence just as spring is round the corner, but think about it: in European latitudes at least, and certainly for our ancestors, this is the time of year when there is dearth and lack, when food supplies are at their lowest, when there is still the long and anxious wait before crops begin to sprout forth, animals grow, things to ripen. Now, as you traipse down the aisles of Tescos, buying strawberries in the dead months, you might not automatically make this connection, but there it is. By making a virtue of starvation and lack, lent creates a sense of communality - after all, everyone is (or rather was) supposed to follow the rules about what you could and could not consume - hence the reason why all the fat in the house had to be used up before the beginning of the period.
In Islam, of course, you have Ramadan, which follows very much the same principal - a month of conscious fasting and abstinence, with people coming together for Iftar at nightfall. The main difference from Lent is that it follows the lunar calendar, so it moves forward by ten days or so each year. This means that someone will always experience the discomfort of a long, hot summer of fasting at least once during their lifetime. It doesn't have the literally visceral connection to food production and lack of the Christian tradition, but it does focus the mind on how it feels to starve like the poorest. Its message is ' here's what it's like to have no food at all', while Lent reminds us of how little we need to actually live on.
And at the end of both? A great big blowout on sweets and chocolates.
All we are asked to do is say farewell to the flesh for a brief time. And, as ever, my birthday falls right at the beginning of the period! So, as I say Vale to my forty-first year and Ave to my forty-second on this planet, I wonder what new things, what changes will happen, and what else shall come.