Still healthy, which is nice. The winter has been unseasonably mild and spring — surely a false spring — is upon us, with teeny leaves and flower buds and a promise of good things to come.

I had high hopes for a little tinkering here and there, mostly under the hood, but not much happened. That was mostly the result of a gross oversight in the paid work department, where the lovely extended holiday season ended with a realisation that I had screwed myself royally. Clawed my way back to sanity, but almost everything else got left behind.

Still healthy, but no sign yet of a call from The Great Vaccinator.

The subhead may make sense to people who were in the UK a good long while ago. They’ll remember too the hassle of travel to “the continent,“ never mind the freedom to move around, work, marry, all of it. All gone now, and for what?

On the plus side, we’re healthy, leading a reasonably good life in a reasonably functional country. And after throwing in the towel on javascript and graphical data, received some really great assistance from Professor von Explaino and began to make teeny bits of progress.

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.

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.