Happy New Year

White Rabbit.

I wish you all a Happy New Year. I hope that 2008 will fulfil and indeed surpass your highest expectations, and completely thwart any of your worries and concerns by being at least 267% better than you feared even in your most depressed moment. Oh hang on that's for me. Well never mind, I wish it for you too. It's supposed to work if you give a present you'd like to receive, isn't it?? So please be bathed in the radiance of my New Year wish for me, er, that is, you.

:)

2008 is of course a Leap Year which is exciting in an obscure way. I suppose it's the realization that we have to do something rather odd because bits of the solar system don't quite fit other bits even if you divide by 9/5 and add 32. Imagine trying to explain it to an alien and they're going "but why didn't you just divide your glodnicks into an equal number of skrrolts? What's this 365.242375 nonsense about?" Or maybe they'd say, "wow, that's a really quite elegant solution for such a primitive planet. Here, have a strawberry xrbbtss!"

According to RandomlyRelevantAndAccurateAtTimesIpedia, 2008 is the:

• International Year of Planet Earth;
• European Year of Intercultural Dialogue;
• Australian Year of the Scout;
• International Year of the Potato;
• International Year of Sanitation.

I feel that this list barely lifts the lid (arf!) and that there must be many hundreds if not thousands of other "Years Of" that 2008 will be. But it's a start. I am far too fat and lazy (none of my New Year's Resolutions or indeed NY Resolutions, aha, having yet taken effect) to actually look any of this stuff up, but potatoes sounds promising. It's one of those fields (aha) like wine, whisky, cheese and apples where I would like to know more and pretend to know the difference between a Désirée and a King Edward. Oh dear I am trivializing - I cheated and looked it up and it's about poverty and ordinary people and stuff, how appalling. I will instruct Mr Thompson to send a small donation on our behalf.

What else? Scouting: excellent, scouting in Australia, ditto; Intercultural Dialogue: fabulous, what the h*ll do you think we are doing right now? great stuff; Planet Earth - yes, jolly good thing too, give it a year - seems quite a broad topic but I am sure some face-painting will help clarify its goals.

Sanitation - damn right. I dare not look this up either as it will turn out to be all worthy and not a good topic for Schloss-dwellers to joke about. Here, indeed, we have had excellent sanitation since 1263 - actually I think it's been the same family of peasants carting it away since then. I must ask Mr Thompson to find out their surname (if they have one) and send them a shilling or something. I seem to recall that we perhaps burnt down their cottage in 1782 or sometime when the service lagged a little and things started to back up somewhat, but they were cheerily back at work soon enough after a generation or two and I am sure there are no hard feelings. Anyway I will support this event to its fullest, er, depth, though I'm not sure how the face-painting will work out, nor what snappy slogan will look good on the posters, but they can probably get Virgin Active's publicity people to work something out. I'm offering them "Disease Is Bad lol !" as a freebie but if they want to use "Proper Toilets Are Rilly Rilly Good lol !" then they can entertain an invoice for it like my other clients. You have to pay for quality like that.

Right, that's 2008 sorted out. Onwards and upwards: Happy New Year.