I am excited to discover that I have something in common with the World’s most powerful man, the leader of the Free World, the Ace in America’s pack. As The Donald told the World Economic Forum in Davos, “I am a very big believer in the Environment”. HashtagMeToo. It’s quite worrying though that he would consider this news. I mean where would we be without an “environment”? Would it not be wise to stipulate what sort of “environment” he believes in? Of course that’s all part of his cunning plan; smokescreens and obfuscation, speak as much gobbledegook as possible and hope that the great unwashed who vote for him think he’s a genius. At the same time, tell the World that America is far greater than it has ever been, far greater than the rest of the world put together, with the greatest war-fighting machine the world has ever seen and, at the risk of appearing slightest immodest, it’s all down to him. Until recently, I worked with an American commentator and former golf professional who thinks that he’s the Ace of Trumps, ably assisted by all the ancillary Trumps (nepotism rules ok) and that the mood in America would have given Glen Miller enough inspiration to write a symphony. My colleague is an intelligent man. (At least so he tells us). Things, therefore, must really be good in America. However, the longest Dow Jones bull market in history isn’t down to market forces. It’s still a raging bull because successive Presidents and their Federal Reserve Chairmen have propped it up with trillions of dollars of printed money, unrealistic interest rates and capital spending that props up growth without any genuine backing. America’s national debt is over Twenty Two Trillion Dollars and rising rapidly. At some point, probably quite soon, the whole pack of cards is going to come tumbling down, with all the Aces and the Trumps at the bottom. Hopefully.

Returning to yesterday’s theme of “greatest tenor”, I have consulted Dan Jordan, Director of Music at Eastbourne College. He proffered a couple of other names, whilst probably plumping for Pavarotti, although he was strongly tempted by the German tenor, Jonas Kaufman. The late Franco Corelli also got a very favourable mention. To get off the fence, I have just done the “hairs on the back of the neck” test, by listening to all three singing Nessum Dorma on You Tube. I see what he means about Kaufman, who possibly has even more depth than Luciano, but the neck test definitely gave it to Pavarotti. If you can be bothered, spend a few minutes on You Tube and see what you think.

Meanwhile Man’s Inhumanity to The Planet continues, with Donald “I know best” Trump flying in the face of the vast majority of scientific experts who believe that greenhouse gases and Global Warming are a very real reality and an impending crisis that we have the power to influence. Will America really re-elect an impeached President with anything but an unimpeachable record? We had an old saying in The Army. “Bullshit Baffles Brains”. There must come a point though…….surely?

Incidentally, I have been writing this with Maria Callas filling my headphones. WHAT A VOICE!

For the first time this year, I wrote 2019 at the top of this piece. How can one be so stupid! I suppose it’s a bit like driving on the wrong side of the road in a foreign country. When you first arrive, you are ultra careful about making sure you adhere to that country’s norms, if they are different to your own. It’s only later, maybe days later, that it’s so easy to come out of a turning on the wrong side of the road, when your mind, perhaps, is not entirely on the job in hand. We had a tragic example of that last year when an American diplomat’s wife, Anne Sacoolis, hit and killed a young motorcyclist, close to the Air Base where her husband was stationed. She promptly fled the country and has declined to return, claiming diplomatic immunity. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of that status how impossibly cowardly, callous and immoral is that? Even worse, Trump’s gallant America is claiming that it’s outrageous to challenge the sanctity of such Immunity by seeking her extradition back to Britain to stand trial for her evident, albeit accidental, crime. She wasn’t even a diplomat for heavens sake, merely married to one. How must the poor young man’s family be feeling? Is that really what Diplomatic Immunity is all about? She killed an innocent young man in the prime of his life. What an increasingly sick world we live in. Sorry, all I did was get the date wrong and end up on a soapbox!

On a lighter note, today is Jack Nicklaus’s eightieth birthday. It is possible that you have never heard of The Golden Bear, especially if you are under twenty and spend your life incarcerated in libraries dedicated to the Ming Dynasty, Ancient Greece and the Incas. Consulting Wikipedia, which is always an entertaining experience, I learn that “he is widely considered to be one of the greatest golfers of all time”. ONE of?! What do you have to do to be THE greatest? There is only one player who can even be considered in the same breath and that is Tiger Woods and those two are so far ahead of anyone else that they could even safely drive on the wrong side of the road. For all the arguments, Nicklaus’s record is far superior to Tiger’s, but the Black American still has power to add to his CV.

Jack shares his day of birth with other such luminaries as Emma (Baby Spice) Bunton, footballers Alex McLeish and Phil Neville, actor Martin Shaw, (I used to work on an airshow programme with his wife….isn’t that interesting?) and Placido Domingo, who is ONE of the greatest tenors of all time. Better than Caruso? Pavarotti? Carreras? In music it’s an even more subjective judgement than golf, where Major titles provide a yardstick. There is no question that measured as an all-round good egg, by his life on and off the golf course, Nicklaus is a giant of a man, hugely respected, if not loved, by everyone. When it comes to charismatic performers, there has surely never been a greater tenor than Luciano Pavarotti, with all due respect to the incredibly brilliant all-round talent of the seventy nine year old Domingo. Out of interest, I will consult Dan Jordan, a former member of the King’s Singers and currently the superb Director of Music at Eastbourne College.

Sadly the man who put cornetto into Opera is no longer with us. Happy Birthday Jack and may you have many more.

 

I have good news to report. Firstly we have had three days of glorious blue skies and winter sunshine. One’s mood is dramatically enhanced by such meteorological munificence. Secondly, celery juice tastes a whole lot less disgusting after a few days. It’s still too early to know if it’s really having any effect on Tiggy’s acne but the early signs are quite promising. The need for a daily dose of juice has thrown up an interesting problem, however. Mrs T thoughtfully got rid of our juicer a while back, as we “never used it”. Since when has that been a good reason for getting rid of anything? She also threw out all three of my rather attractive cake slices. Now, on the not infrequent occasions when we have guests to afternoon tea I have to use a knife to serve up her delicious fruit cake. No class.

To date, I have been using our powerful Nutri Bullet to convert the celery stalks into a pulp and then use a sieve in a fairly labour intensive manner to produce as much of the skin enhancing liquid as possible. It’s both a cumbersome and somewhat tedious procedure. (Note to self…we are out of celery!) Various friends, including my wife (and yes, I do count her as a friend) have suggested that I should go out and buy a cheap juicer; “don’t spend much money on it, there are lots of perfectly good cheap ones out there”. Oh yes? I have spent a considerable amount of time visiting Lakeland, Go Cook and various other high class kitchen utensil emporia only to find that they either don’t supply juicers at all, or in Lakeland’s case their cheapest (in fact only) one is over £300; not cheap by any measure.

Surely the internet/Amazon would throw up plenty of offers. A very expert website designed to tell you everything you need to know about every style of juicer (and there are at least half a dozen varieties) recommends the Best in Each Class. Needless to say there was nothing under about £300 here. Is £150 cheap? So far I haven’t managed to find anything for much less that wouldn’t catch fire and disintegrate within five minutes of using it. Alison took up the challenge. As the proud owner of a lovely Kitchen Aid mixer (a present from her ever-loving hubby) I guess it was almost inevitable that her best suggestion was to buy a Kitchen Aid add-on that looks like a mock-up of Sputnik and the Space Station combined and will apparently meet all my needs and more….for a mere £120. This was the woman who had originally advised me “for heavens sake don’t get anything expensive, just a simple, cheap juicer”. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that I will be stuck with the Nutri Bullet and sieve, which has the merit of being very easy to use and even easier to clean. My only concern is that the venerable Bullet is starting to smell a bit when on full steam and is making an increasingly weird noise. I was slightly concerned to learn in Lakeland that they have apparently stopped making them. Is there a major design flaw that only manifests itself after three hundred hours of operation?

With all the health fads that are being promoted nowadays, most of which incorporate juicing of something at some point, you would think this would be an instantly solvable problem. Ha….it would be easier to buy a Tesla, if slightly more expensive. On the subject of which, why didn’t I buy some Tesla shares in 2013 when I saw those beautiful cars popping up all over Hong Kong, before anyone realised that Elon Musk wasn’t the latest variety of Chanel perfume? The shares have gone up 3,000% since. Even £100 invested then would have allowed me to buy a top of the range juicer now without a second thought. Oh well.

 

I am sad…..and grumpy. I think it’s S.A.D. or Seasonal Affective Disorder. The thing people get when they don’t get enough sunlight. All my life this has never been a problem. For as long as I can remember I have spent much of every winter away, either skiing or following European golf to far distant (and sunny) lands. Normally I would be in Abu Dhabi this week, having already had weeks in South Africa. My new work-free life means joining the great unwashed in suffering month after month of British winter, untainted by foreign relief. I feel as though my circadian rhythms are up the creek, although I haven’t got a clue what they are. I heard somebody talking about them the other day and they sound important. Apparently you can get lights that will work as a substitute for the sun, to balance your melatonin and serotonin. I’m a bit worried though about increasing my carbon footprint with a mega powerful lamp, although thinking about it if I’m not flying over one hundred thousand air miles, I must be in considerable credit; carbon negative even. Which apparently is what Microsoft are aiming to be by 2030. I’m not clear yet what that means either, but no doubt David Attenborough will soon hove into sight to explain that as well.

I am curious to know how we can reduce air travel or perhaps more importantly reduce the pollution from jet engines? Solar powered electric engines? Hydrogen seems to be gaining traction as a clean fuel, but will it power aero engines? Or are we all suddenly going to stop holidaying abroad? Will all international business be done on Skype? Will all freight go by sea? I was a bit concerned that in my previous eighty four blogs I hadn’t used enough question marks.

I am actually doing my bit for climate change. I had a period a year or two back where I was a vegan, mainly on health grounds, but also on the basis that we should dramatically reduce the number of cows on this planet because they produce enough methane gas to raise sea levels by three feet. I discovered though that an overdose of veg meant I was suddenly emitting as much gas as half a herd of Fresians myself. The family were relieved when I returned to a more balanced diet.

Talking of diets, I have persuaded my slightly acne-afflicted daughter to try a glass of celery juice every morning before breakfast. There seem to be good case studies to show that it might work. We are only on day two so it’s probably a bit soon to pass judgement, but I will keep you posted. It might be pure coincidence but she suffered with a badly swollen knee today, for no apparent reason. Can celery do that?

I have joined her in this mission, in the hope that it might make me less sad and grumpy.

P.S. If you care, Google will provide a simple explanation of Circadian Rhythms.

What does your fridge door look like I wonder? Whilst giving the vegetable tray a new lease of life this afternoon I realised it wasn’t just the inside of the Bosch that was in need of a Spring clean. The front and both sides are covered in multifarious stickers, magnets, photos, magnets holding photos, magnets with letters on, magnets with numbers on, magnets displaying tacky memorabilia of distant lands that we have been lucky enough to visit and magnetised photo frames with pictures of far distant lands that…etc. No doubt the back would also be so adorned if it wasn’t wedged up against the wall, thereby allowing ingress and egress through the doorway that separates our tiny kitchen from the rest of our extremely modest accommodation. There’s actually a little more room than I realised when we first measured up before moving, because I miscalculated how the marble top dresser would fit in with the dishwasher and unnecessarily sold our lovely extra large fridge whilst keeping the smaller one. (We were downsizing from two houses, which isn’t as fiscally exciting as it might sound). It has been a source of marital irritation ever since….as you might imagine. Anyway, the stickers; if memory serves me right and there is absolutely no guarantee of that, the white kitchen units of my youth, including the Frigidaire, were extensively white, unsullied by all the modern trappings. I suppose it was a waste of useful space. Sadly, I cannot now even begin to hazard a guess when the first Fridge Art started to appear, but on the whole I think it has been a tremendous addition to our daily lives. It means there is somewhere to put all those envy-inducing postcards from tropical holidaying mates, other than the waste bin. Somewhere to stick the cheesy group photos of friends and their children, which you really don’t want to throw away, but know you will never look at from one year to the next if you put them in the “not sure what to do with this” drawer. Then of course there are all those clever little magnets with philosophical sayings or erudite witticisms that I can never remember, like “If at first you don’t succeed then skydiving isn’t for you” or “My husband needs glasses….he still doesn’t see things my way”. Where, for heavens sake, would we put the children’s incredibly complicated daily schedules, or the council’s bin collection dates, or the equivalents for solids and liquids, or the landscape gardeners card, or…… and so on. I think my favourites amongst this ocean of innovation though are the magnetic letters of the alphabet that allow you to display your potential for Scrabbler of the Month with an ever changing pattern of clever words your children have never heard of. That is the ,longest paragraph I have written in eighty four blogs. My English teacher wife would undoubtedly tut tut.

New par. Sadly, the veggie tray cleansing took so long I had to go and sit down for a rest in front of Ski Sunday and by the time I had finished reminiscing (I commentated on Ski Sunday for thirteen years, just in case I hadn’t mentioned it before) any thoughts of re-organising the chaotic assembly of trivia that now decorates our fridge had completely left my mind. Anyway, there were greater priorities to be actioned, such as visiting Boots and Sainsbury’s to re-stock the aforementioned ice box, as well as purchasing four important requests for Mrs T; her special brand of Colgate toothpaste, some smoked paprika, mixed spices and wholegrain bagels. Sunday shopping is never high on my agenda at the best of times and it may well be that it is the first Sunday in my life where I have been to Boots. Having queued lengthily for advice on a simple medical aid that I needed, only to discover they didn’t stock it, I went in search of Alison’s special toothpaste. Remarkably quickly I discovered the right shelf, which was stuffed full of various familiar names in the dental hygiene firmament including Colgate. Aha, this should be simple. Impressively, I had memorised the required edition and would surely find it in seconds. Unbelievably there were sixteen (at least, I may have slightly miscounted) variations of Colgate stacked on three shelves. Still, with this selection it had to be there somewhere. A cursory glance failed. A more detailed study failed again. Now it was carefully examine every box. Nope, it definitely wasn’t there. Remembering what one should do nowadays, I whipped out the phone/camera, took a clever photo of the whole assembly and What’s App’d it to my dog-walking wife for further instructions. Awaiting the response I wandered off in search of anything and happened upon some obviously good (very expensive) blister protectors which I thought would help my newly shoed and heel-blistered son. With no response on the paste front it was off to pay for the blister stuff. Still only one young female sales assistant, who was making very heavy weather of reducing the queue that I dutifully joined. What’s happening now? She’s buggered off to help a typical Eastbourne resident find where the aspirin is shelved. With much muttering between the strangers waiting to pay and a growing sense of angst I finally made my first purchase. Time for Sainsbury’s thinks I and was heading out of Boots at the very moment What’s App lights up with the somewhat overdue intelligence that this specialist toothpaste is kept on shelves in another aisle. Greeting this info with extreme scepticism I duly found the bloody stuff in an instant. Could I in all honesty claim they didn’t have it? Nope, it was back into the queue and blow me down I was just about to reach the front when off the dumb blonde (ok in fairness she wasn’t that dumb but was certainly blonde, well blonde in appearance anyway) disappears again to help another deaf, blind and motorised octogenarian find something one aisle away, which then necessitated her having a lengthy discussion with a colleague (about the weather probably) which was her excuse for absence when I finally blew my cool and told her they were encouraging shop-lifting with their inefficiency and lack of customer care. She didn’t respond well.

Finally I had almost completed the required Sainsbury’s shop with just the bagels and spice to go. No wholemeal sadly, but some mixed grain which looked nice. I risked the wrath of the Boss. Just mixed spices to find and it was back to the toothpaste routine with a vast array of bottles offering everything from cumin to mixed herbs. A significant number of labels were facing inwards so that involved turning numerous bottles around only to be disappointed. At last, with temper barely controlled the Ground Mixed Spices showed themselves. Halle-bloody-lujah.

In case I haven’t secured your sympathy so far, my day also included shuttling my son to golf and back, stripping the beds, doing three washes and hanging out and ,to add insult to injury, cooking my own supper. Mind you I do that everyday anyway, so it didn’t come as a great surprise. My clean sheets await.

Imagine yourself happily ensconced in seat 1A, strapped into your Business Class seat on a Ukranian Airlines Boeing 737, heading for an interesting holiday in The Ukraine, trundling down the runway, V1, V2, climbing into the empty sky and all is well. Suddenly, BAM, your world explodes around you. If you are lucky you die instantly. If you are not so lucky you have a few agonising moments to contemplate what really happens on the other side. Will there actually be seven vestal virgins waiting to tend to your every need? Or will Gabriel be there, wings flapping, waiting to introduce you to Pete and hopefully his Boss, if he’s not too busy meeting the millions of others who’ve just popped their clogs? Or perhaps there will just be an enormous black void of nothingness. No reunion with Mummy and Daddy, nor even a depressing hook-up with Lucifer.

I make light of something that for those involved, both in the air and on the ground, was and is truly awful. But at least I am being a realist, which increasingly seems to be verboten. I am fat. I am not proud of this fact and hopefully I am not yet obese. I am happy to acknowledge this FACT and I am also happy for friends to encourage me to do something about it. Not in the “hey fatty, have you seen your toes” style, but more “come on Julian, lose a bit of weight, live long and prosper”; more Vulcan than vulgar is good. But apparently I am not allowed to tell my 14 year old son that he is a little plump; nothing too serious, just a little lardy around the middle, but definitely highly undesirable for any teenager and especially one who has aspirations to be a good sportsman. Nor it seems am I even allowed to tell him that he is deeply unfit. Yet again this is a statement of unarguable fact. What ludicrous point have we reached in society, where it is offensive to tell our kith and kin the truth, not with a view to being unkind, but because we love them and want them to live a long and happy life, which we know, from our much greater experience, is less likely to happen if they don’t change their indolent and unhealthy habits? What really worries me is that so many sensible and worldly-wise parents are happy to acknowledge the lunacy of this trend, but few seem prepared to stand up and fight it. I was constantly being told by my much younger producers that “you can’t say that nowadays”. Who says I can’t? How on earth have we as a society allowed ourselves to slide onto this slippery slope with an end that takes us who knows where? Animal Farm, Brave New World, 1984 and I Robot all come to mind.

Because I had been thinking a lot about commentary styles yesterday I wanted to listen to the great Richard Dimbleby’s sonorous tones, which the miracle of You Tube allows you to do. Firstly I watched Churchill’s funeral. It was brilliant and evocative description but it made me wonder what Winnie would say if he could see what the Great Britain he fought to save has become. I then watched the Coronation of our present Queen. Again Dimbleby was on top form and despite being in black and white it was truly awesome in the literal sense of the word. Remembering that this took place sixty six years ago made one realise just what an incredible servant Her Majesty has been to this Country. It brought the actions of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex into even bolder relief. The Duchess (of my County!) jokingly made some reference to trying Britain’s traditional “stiff upper lip”, but found it too difficult. I know I am going to sound like the grumpiest of grumpy old men, but I really do fear for where we are going.

I reckon a walk along the seafront with Callie (the whippet) is the answer. It’s mainly a pebble beach, but there is just enough sand to bury my head in it.

 

2DtC

You will have to take my word for this, but so far I have managed to write 2020 at the first attempt every time without having to edit my script. Maybe I’m not going senile after all.

I have had to do a considerable amount of driving in the last forty eight hours which involved listening to a lot of radio. This is invariably a pleasurable experience although because of my trade, (commentator and broadcaster) I can’t help but listen with a critical and judgemental ear. There are a few things that you hear, from sports broadcasters in particular, that baffle and more often than not, irritate me. For decades, football commentators have talked about how “Smith will pass the ball to Jones, who will lob it over the goalkeeper….and SCORES!’. Why, why, why do they talk in the future tense about something that has just happened in front of their eyes? Are they trying to sound clever, or is it just a lazy habit? Those same numpties also talk about “your leaderboard” or “our leaderboard”. It’s not mine or yours it’s “THE”. Traditionally the role of the commentator is to remain an objective and unbiased observer. It can’t therefore be “our leader” or the commentator is immediately claiming a part in the team or organisation. Then there are the presenters and Classic FM can boast a couple of these, who talk in a curiously and unnaturally interrupted fashion, leaving pauses…..where…..pauses aren’t supposed…..to be. I am thinking of two former newsreaders in particular who didn’t talk like that when reading the news from autocue or in real life. So why do they inflict such irritation on their long-suffering listeners? Perhaps more importantly, why don’t their producers say something? Why isn’t everyone as perfect as me?!

When I was learning my trade, I was always encouraged to listen and watch tapes of my work with a critical ear and eye. I was astonished to hear some quite eminent actors talking recently and admitting that they couldn’t stand watching their own work and therefore never did. How on earth can you improve if you have no idea how you come across? How you look and sound? I am obviously wrong about this, because the actors in question are very successful, rich and famous. Or perhaps they could be even better if they critically analysed their work?

On which most unsatisfactory note I am retiring to bed to listen to the 10 o’clock news on  BBC Radio 4, which will undoubtedly be presented with precision and élan. Perhaps.

 

2DtC

I thought I knew a thing or two about Christmas. For instance, the 6th January is Twelfth Night and therefore the 6th is the day by which Christmas decorations should be put away for another year if fateful ill luck is not to befall upon the household. It seems, however, that nothing is that simple. Having consulted the all-knowing Wikipedia, the Twelve Days of Christmas can start on Christmas Day or Boxing Day depending on what branch of Christianity you adhere to and whether you sleep on your side or your back. Therefore, if you count the apocryphal day of Jesus’s birth as Day 1, today (5th Jan) is actually the Twelfth Night and the Eve of Epiphany, the alleged occasion when the Three (or two or four) Kings (The Magi) followed their magic star to say “Hi” to the Son of God. (There is apparently no hard evidence that the Kings existed at all, never mind there being three. Still, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story…. we would be down at least one good carol without them). Anyway,….to be on the safe side, Tutt house is now totally de-decorated, the tinsel, baubles, artificial tree and lights all safely boxed and stacked in the attic. (Unfortunately it’s an understairs cupboard as we live in a garden flat, but it doubles up as an attic).

Further trawling through the previously mentioned online encyclopaedia reveals that in the other half of our County, i.e. West Sussex, there’s an ancient tradition of wassailing apple trees on Twelfth night to ensure a good harvest. As far as I recall, wassailing is a sort of mixture of Morris Dancing, singing madrigals and getting heartily pissed on mead….but I could be wrong. Across the border in parts of Kent, there’s a ritual that the last vestige of Christmas to be removed should be an edible decoration that can be shared with all the family. I haven’t told the children. Apparently England and France share a custom of baking a Twelfth Night cake with a bean and a pea in it. Whoever got the slices containing those would be King and Queen respectively for the night. I would be tempted to believe that except for the fact that I cannot accept that we share anything with the French, let alone an interesting, if harmless, tradition. Such is the importance of the occasion, that the Noble Bard even wrote a play specifically to be performed on “Twelfth Night”. Something went wrong in the planning though as the first performance took place at Middle Temple Hall in the City of London on 2nd February 1602. Poetic licence I guess.

Much more significantly for those involved in education, the three week respite is over, tomorrow heralds a return to the grindstone, the start of the Lent Term. (I wonder how much longer it will be called that, as this Country becomes ever more multi-denominational? Surely it’s offensive to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindis, and probably Eskimos for all I know and as we now know, offending anybody is rapidly becoming a capital offence, punishable by stoning, castration, neutering, decapitation or any other form of indignity that renders one helpless…..if not dead.) Mrs Tutt has spent the day doing almost nothing in preparation for the exhausting physical, mental, psychological and dietary challenges to come. There’s only one thing worse than being a teacher at this time and that’s being married to one.

Perhaps in a future missive I will go into why teachers really do need long holidays. Until then, I intend to enjoy Twelfth Night in the customary Sussex way and hope that I see neither stars nor Kings in the morning…..although a little gold wouldn’t go amiss.

2DtC

 

Oh dear, tears all round. The ten year old son of last night’s hosts has a national ranking for a reason. He is brilliant. Master Tutt took a whooping as did his humbled father who managed to take three points off the child prodigy, but only because the aforementioned youth made careless mistakes. Not a good start to 2020.

I spotted an interesting statistic today (if that’s not an oxymoron) in The Week. According to a national survey 33% of Britons think they could do a better job than Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Which means that in our family of four at least one person has delusions of grandeur. Alison’s (my wife) response to the survey question was “no idea”. I fancy what she really meant was “not a prayer”. Without asking the children (14 and 12) I can confidently predict that they would not outperform Boris. Which just leaves me. I am in no doubt that I wouldn’t be a match for Jeremy Corbyn let alone the runaway Election winner. I reckon that there would be an awful lot of families who would fall into the same bracket. So where on earth do they get 33% from. Either there are enormous swathes of extremely talented families lurking in the industrial wastelands just waiting for their chance, or the stats are complete baloney. Take your pick, but I would be inclined to plump for the latter. Lies, damned lies and statistics. But every walk of life now is blitzed by them. Sadly, sport isn’t spared. With data bases to hand, golf commentators proudly pronounce that “that’s the third time in fifteen rounds this season that he’s made a birdie at the second hole”. Hold the front page. Clearly there are any number of folk who find the constant flow of data interesting, but personally I would much rather know what the chap in question does in his spare time, what eccentric hobbies he has and crucially who is he sleeping with.

I have been involved in a number of interesting “gender fluid” conversations in the last twenty four hours. As an Old Fart, I find the whole subject quite hard to get my head around. It does seem though that the future, including in schools, is for shared lavatory and bathroom facilities. This will presumably call for a lot of individual cubicles where you can enter fully clothed, lock the door, remove enough attire to complete whatever the task in hand is, dry yourself if you got wet, replace the removed articles and re-enter the LBGTQ+ Gender Neutral/Fluid/who cares world untainted by social interaction. According to Alison, who cares for a flock of some seventy “girls” (at least that’s what they are currently known as), to a person they loathe the idea. So do I. Just as King Canute proved tragically inadequate in his mission to prevent coastal erosion, I fear there is no stopping this tidal wave of lunacy. I am going to bed with the full complement of dangly bits, traditionally associated with men. However, I may wake up and declare myself female. Why not? Perhaps I will have a go at Boris’s job. I could be the third woman PM.

(I am slightly concerned that 2020 is getting off to a bizarre start?)

Happy New Year. I know that is a rather conventional opening but as you can realistically only use it once a year, I don’t feel as though I am in danger of excessive repetition. I suppose I could have said Happy New Decade, which is a much rarer salutation. So, yes, Happy New Decade. There has to be a reasonable chance it’s the last time I will be able to say that, unless they use the Gregorian calendar on Cloud 9. At least I was able to say Happy New Millennium too and I’ve had cause to remember that occasion a few times over the Christmas holiday. I spent the Millennium Eve, 10,000 feet up on the Monta Rosa massif in Italy along with a few old buddies and my first wife, an extremely accomplished Canadian skier. We stayed in a beautiful old hotel that was in the process of being rescued from terminal decay by the grandson of the original owner. The downstairs was wonderfully cosy with electricity supplied by a generator and water from melted snow. The upstairs rooms were wood-panelled and did have beds, but modern luxuries beyond that were conspicuous by their absence. After a fairly simple climb up to the top of the mountain on skis we arrived there in late afternoon under clear skies and with the mercury plunging to minus twenty degrees. We had been forewarned to take our arctic sleeping bags, which were reasonably essential as the pine-lined bedroom walls were white with a layer of hoar frost. Getting in and out of bed was interesting and any need to pee at night was firmly resisted. In addition to our group of eight there was a table of loud and entertaining Swedes, all in dinner jackets and long dresses (against modern convention the men wore dinner jackets and the women were in the dresses) and another fifty or so guests from Italy, who certainly knew how to party. We had taken up a reasonable supply of fireworks to brighten the midnight sky, but stupidly I had allowed an old mate, who was suffering badly with flu, to rig up my piece de resistance, a multi-barrelled rocket launcher that was going to hurl multiple pyrotechnics into the star-struck sky. “Was going to” probably gives the hint that something went wrong! The Wally had strapped it to a post upside down and having lit the blue touchpaper and retired we watched in horror as the expensive box of tricks emptied its load into the unsuspecting snow three feet below it. It didn’t quite produce the effect we had hoped for. However, we did have a wonderful view of the dramatic displays around Milan and Turin in the valleys miles below.

All this was brought into sharp relief as I met the son in law of very old friends a couple of days after Christmas and he had spent a number of years as a ski instructor in Champaluc and knew of the hotel high above, which heartbreakingly burned down a few years ago. Maybe it was the Millennium Bug……

Having seen in the New Year, in extremely sober and boring fashion, we plan to frolic and cavort on the first day of 2020 with newish friends from whom music oozes from every pore and who love to play games. An evening of song, dance, Monopoly and charades beckons. With three young sons from different families who all play table tennis to a high standard, I fancy that Ping Pong will feature quite highly too. Fourteen year old Master Tutt is a few years older than the other two, so there may be tears at midnight if he doesn’t reign supreme. Our hosts’ son, four years younger, does have a national ranking though, so competition will be fierce. There will definitely be tears if they beat me.

The decade is already fifteen hours old. The trick now is to remember to sign everything 2020. Good luck.