All clients have discovered unspent money and are rushing to dole it out before the end of the year, because if they don’t, they won’t have it next year. Which is crazy, and leads to some rough days, but is, on balance, good for me.

Back in a lighter lockdown, and discovering that what this year has shown more than anything else is that we need one another more than we need outside things, but outside things do add to life.

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I don’t really need to write much here; just enough to make sure that there is something to receive when I go out and try to logon from outside.

And bang, there it is. I couldn’t be happier. Not least because I feel I have dodged several bullets.

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The good news is that my new passport arrived on Monday (first in November, but worth a mention). The bad is that we’re looking at another lockdown, albeit slightly lighter, and it seems highly unlikely that I’ll need a new passport before 2021 at the earliest. But we did manage a couple of days away in Florence, soaking up some culture to last through the dark days ahead. Marketing the podcast — at least as far as buying €30 of advertising on FB goes — was a complete bust. Not one new listener that I could detect. But more people do seem to be downloading the transcripts, so that’s surely a better use of the money.

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You might think, what with my interest in food and living in Italy, that I would have devoured this book when it first came out, but I didn’t, and I don’t know why. It is so glorious, in so many respects. Most importantly, it gives the lie to the idea that Italian food is a food of poverty or someho...

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Exercise really is a funny thing. I’ve tried various forms over the years, some of them more fun and longer lasting than others. For a while I was very taken with the Canadian Air Force’s 5BX plan. It seemed to have just the right amount of fiddliness to appeal to my inner nerd. That fell away, and then, just over a year ago I started doing the 7-minute stuff, high-intensity interval training. Slowly, slowly, even at my advanced age, it became easier to get through one cycle. Then two. Then the full workout, three cycles in total.

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