This is not a monthly review

This time last year, I bought two gizmos that improved my on-the-road writing experience a lot; a Roost laptop stand and a little Logitech bluetooth keyboard. Add in my bluetooth mouse, and I can work comfortably almost anywhere I can find a table and chair. Except when I cannot find the right chair.

For the past week or so I've been staying in a lovely house, warm and friendly and comfortable in every way, with a lovely big dining table around which we have shared lovely big meals. The table is amply furnished with chairs, and the chairs are perfect for lolling about in, eating, drinking and chatting amiably.

But they're hell when I'm trying to work.

They're just too low, and the seats are somewhat sunken, so the front bar presses into the back of my thighs. Piling cushions on helps a bit, but not quite enough. As a result, while I am perfectly happy to be here reading on the screen and tapping out the occasional note, I am horribly fiddly when it comes to writing anything of substance. Ordinarily, a break like this would be a super opportunity to get my monthly review out promptly and to contemplate an annual review. There are other things I know I ought to be doing, but I'm not doing those either, and all because of the seating.

To mangle some words that will probably fail to resonate with most of the people who read this, "Are you sitting comfortably? ... Then I cannot begin."

Instead, I've been reading other people's roundups of weeks, months, years and decades and setting reminders for myself so that I catch up with my own as soon as I can. One of my favourites was Jeremy Keith's Words I wrote in 2019, which contained this little gem:

I’m pretty sure that I will also continue to refer to them as blog posts, not blogs. I may be the last holdout of this nomenclature in 2020. I never planned to die on this hill, but here we are.

I choose to die on this self-same hill, alongside Jeremy.

Truth be told, I usually circumlocute the issue by talking about pieces or articles or some such thing, but in my mind, I know they are blog posts, and this is the first of the new year.