What's a month or two between old friends?

So there I was, checking who'd visited this blog (again), when it occurred to me: how patient (?), persistent (?), blindly optimistic (?) these individuals are, when there's been nothing new to read for so long, that Twitter's taken over the universe and I now wear varifocals.

A belated New Year's greeting to all those "multiple visits spread over more than one day", as Statcounter calls you; in Rye, Montclair and Miami Beach (why, why, would anyone in Miami ruddy Beach read this rather than look out of the window??), not to mention Ottawa, Beverley Hills and Houston, and never forgetting the old faithfuls so much nearer home in Cambridge, London, Bucks and Berks.

I failed to record the snow at its thickest, above is the garden taken groggily the last morning it snowed so feebly here, that I was obliged to go to work, when I would have rather stayed home to watch the foxes leave tracks all over it. Below is indoors same evening.

Health's entirely fine these days. Recently signed off by a gastro-enterology consultant who took an extra course in booming in a loud and confident manner to reassure his maturer clientele, "Your liver is boringly [ridiculous pause] normal. Your pancreas is boringly [same pause - maybe he belongs to an Amateur Dramatics society?] normal. If all of my patients were as normal as you..." I practically finished the sentence for him. Still, at least someone, somewhere thinks I'm normal. Whatever next?