First Day of Spring has a different ring to it, donchafind? 2019: there’s an otherness. Not even near cresting its Fell / Furth / Munro / Fawr … top is what I’m trying to say, it seems as though we’re all goldfish, opening and closing mouths with nothing useful emerging. Our unchartered waters are … well, what are they: choppy? turgid? modal?

It feels like we’re all in a state of suspended animation.

Terrible things, really terrible things are happening in the world yet there’s a sense each is just another fish in the bouillabaisse of woe. The grinding tedium of this dismal process offends every fibre of generosity cultivated over a life-time of believing that we’ve just this one world [unless and until China finishes building its new wall on the Dark Side of the Moon] and isn’t it kinder to be cheerful with our neighbours?

Not an apologist by nature – I wonder how these isles would respond were they forced to devote n years’ time, humanity and resource to the internal affairs of a neighbouring country? I daresay the UK would respond as Princess Anne so ably instructed a photographer eons ago [Badminton, 1982] to Naff Orf.

As we ricochet between Limbo and Purgatory in a kind of maniacal pinball, what words of comfort are there to find, better to soothe geological laid furrows of our brow?

We can and will do this: we can and will make it through and we shall emerge into a fully sprung Spring with something over which to be joyful.

Convinced? Naaaaaah: neither am I.