He tasted of ham. 

It didn’t even feel particularly anti-clerical, as dreams go, and not violent, since the baby Jesus isn’t real. Except in the sense that King Arthur is. So at an emotional level  it was a bit like cutting up a King Arthur made of chocolate and marzipan and eating it.

But it was odd. 

Happy Christmas, people. 

I’m taking a break from organising dinner for something like 14. It’s started to rain, so my original plan of having ewverybody on the front lawn isn’t going to work. The forecast – heavy rain – suggests that my back-up plan of putting the tables on the veraqndah isn’t going to work weither. So it’ll have to be inside. Which will take a bit of ingenuity. 

Anyway, these aren’t real problems.

Good fortune and love to all readers, and I hope that you get good things that you want and good surprises that you never even thought of wanting, you wantons.

And that the Force, the police and the religiously enthusiastic all stay away from your front door. 

Sorry for blog inaction. I’ve just finished work for 2013. Paid work, anyway, unless some late contract comes in. (I do social and economic research and write things for money. This keyboard for hire! Very reasonable rates!)

Up until today I’ve been advising a corporation on how it can keep its essential services going in the event of a natural disaster, terrorist attack, etc. They’ll never read this blog, so I’ll just admit here and now that I’m no expert on any of that stuff. On the other hand, I said I wasn’t and they didn’t care. Well, they’ve got a few weeks to read the first draft. 

“If we go by the book, as Lt Saavik suggests, minutes will seem like hours.”

I’m going to build something in the garden, and sit under trees, and do some other stuff that I won’t talk about for a while under the Five-Year Rule. Though the Five-Year Rule is like the Prime Directive. It’s applied intermittently when it feels right, and it’s never allowed to get in the way of a good story.

Anyway, I need to think about how to tell the story of the meeting between the bosses of the probation service and the cops. A lot happened there and if I just tell it topic by topic it’ll read like minutes, and minutes will seem like hours. So I’ll have to shape and select a bit. I should be ready tomorrow. 

I’m in a pub in Woolloomooloo, in Sydney. In Australia. It’s probably a nineteenth century building, that’s been a working class pub, mainly for blokes, for most of the last hundred years. Now there’s a theatre attached and they’re doing King Lear tonight. So it’s a luvvies’ pub as well. I’ve worked on building sites and factories, but I’m more of a luvvie myself these days. Anyway, I came to see Lear.

There are puppies pissing on the carpet. That’s not going to harm the carpet much. I guess that from a puppy point of view the place already smells like a midden,  and so you should add you own specific aromas to the rich and complex brew the humans have built up over the generations. 

There are pretty girls, gaga-ing at the puppies. The pups are sitting up and begging.

They don’t want anything in particular but they like the attention, so they’re hind-legging with their front paws together.

I’ve been travelling and working. This is the first time I’ve been on-line, in my own time and on my own computer, in nearly a week. The Probation Officer story has got up to the confrontation I had to have eventually with the local cops, about Ana, and their dealings with her father. I tell that part of the story probably tomorrow or the next day. I’ll be on my way back home by then.