I accumulated quite a lot of 'I have been mostly' mentioned. (I've watched a lot of telly. Read some books. Seen some films.)
I even wrote an earlier 'something's coming' post.
I've taken a lot of photos (some of which I've plastered all over my socials already so, old news).
The intention was there.
But here's the thing.
My dad died on 27th January.
So, as you can imagine, the impetus to blog has been minimal at best.
I'm still processing it, eleven or so weeks later; and yes, it has only been weeks, really.
I'm OK with the reality of the words themselves, but not OK with what they entail.
I'm not ready to write about it, that's a certainty.
And even if I were, it may not end up on here.
I'm OK insofar as I am getting up, going to work. Socialising. In March I even sang with my magnificent choir (yes, I was the one bawling my eyes out reaching the crescendo of Unchained Melody; you're welcome).
So I'm functioning. I couldn't really not.
Although burn-out happens fairly rapidly and I do find myself in NOPE mode after a much shorter span of time.
As such, I'm not really 'creating' at the moment.
My poor novel has been neglected since (*checks last saved Word document*) 27th November.
The last sketch I made was this one, as part of the Sketchbook Challenge:
I'm not potato-ing; well, not all the time... but as I said to my manager and publisher last week by way of trying to explain where my head's at, I am not at peak Beth.
I'm not sure I'm going to be for a while.
And to that end I'm not sure that this blog can ever work again the way it used to; mostly because I'm not living the way I used to.
Everything's changed, and I can't pretend that a blog that I kept alive at a time when my life held a certain structure can still serve me in the same way.
Within less than a month, friends, things were already different.
And I'm being courageous, in so many ways, in alignment with my Word for the Year, but to that end I do need to admit that this blogging lark also needs to look different and work differently.
The long-form format just isn't where I'm at any more. She says, peddling a post that's currently tipping 530 words.
I don't want to go completely short-form, that's evidently not how I roll; but I feel like little and often may be the way to go.
I'm trying to link my Instagram more intuitively to this blog, so that posts turn up on here automatically from there.
As a fair trade-off I'll try to write more by way of captions on the 'gram although I won't write whole, lengthy posts the way I used to with the Sunday Summaries back in the day.
I will also try to be a bit more immediate with sharing my often unremarkable thoughts on what I'm reading, watching, absorbing, interested in; this might also take the form of links over on the quirky brunette Facebook page, which I know I don't use nearly enough. Whatever enough is.
The blog baby still needs to be fed, somehow.
And I need to flex the muscles.
But gently.
qb xx
* I know, I know, it's not actually a fail, I'm just trying to be quippy.
I just checked in to see if my IFTTT link was working and uploading my copious Instagram content here (it was not), and it was like seeing a school crush after years; you get that same rush of adrenaline, break out a jaw-straining smile, and start waffling like someone short-circuited your brain... but you're not quite sure how to fill in the gaps between now and the last time you saw said crush.
Too much has happened in a year when, ironically, little did, and when it did, it was super-tentative. And ironically again, having read over everything I wrote just over a year ago... not much has changed, or has it?!
I don't even know any more!
I tried blogging a couple of times this year, but it just felt unwieldy and time-consuming to try to encapsulate literally months' worth of content into one wibbly little post.
And the unwieldiness was, let's face it, why the blog toppled over somewhat in the first place.
Curse my wild social whirl in those carefree, pre-panini-press days.
But, I miss it. I really do, and I know I said this over a year ago and did sweet nothing to remedy the situation but this time, to quote Donna Summer, I know it's for real.
I miss having a regular writing outlet. I miss my own hilarity, for starters (because if you're not writing for your own amusement or benefit in the first instance, why write at all?).
So, I may have to give this malarkey another go, and a proper go again this time, but make it manageable.
That's not to say I can in all good conscience promise to resume the Sunday Summary on the sort of weekly basis that 2017-era QB used to manage.
But sometimes when the muse calls, she isn't always asking after an accident that wasn't your fault, and she actually wants to hear what you have to say.
So, what now?
At some point over the last thirty... million... days of pandemonium, lockdowns, relentless swabs up noses and down throats, and an unfortunate, positive result that had me bedridden for a week, I made a strange sort of peace with the whole arrangement, a sort of acceptance that the New Normal is Here and It's Citing Squatters' Rights.
And while I've long held a belief deeply-rooted in the 1990s film Mermaids that, yes:
Life is change; death is dwelling on the past or staying in one place too long
which I've managed to counter quite happily, and quirkily, for the last 31 years (sheesh), the New Normal has decreed that actually change is the new black...
...and that if I'm to breathe any sort of new life into this here blog, and into my life itself, then its whole prerogative needs to change. It needs to work for me.
Be my assistant to the regional manager, if you will.
I love Dwight Schrute in a wild, unhealthy way.
At this point it's probably important for you to know that not only did I review several films, series, books that I'd viewed or read since November last year, I've also fallen hard for The Office US which has rendered most everything else irrelevant. (I mean, the series ended in 2013 so that's how current my viewing habits are.)
📺🎥
And I will probably never understand the rationale behind the monumental Fall of Jan Levinson (except that she/the marvellous Melora Hardin had a full credibility glow-up and ended up in The Bold Type which for two of three series was decent).
But none of my considered critiques (ha) seemed relevant after a couple of months, and so to the Great Recycle Bin in the Sky they were duly consigned.
I then spent a good deal of the summer trying to fix myself.
💓🍏
A couple of concerning symptoms (and a couple of visits to possibly the dishiest doctor I've ever had the fortune to be in the presence of) resulted in me deciding that now was as good a time as any to get my life together, and so began reading such discerning texts as this:
from which I picked and chose the information I was happy to take on board; it being written by an American doctor, everything was autoimmune:
and there was no direct consideration of conditions that may be congenital (hi there, my CHT posse – baby, you were born this way...).
And I was fully aware that whatever I ate wouldn't ever 'heal' the thyroid but may perhaps help with the resultant crummy metabolism...
Enter my new regime.
And for the purposes of circumventing what may be construed to be triggers, I'm not going to go into too much detail about the events of the last five months but I made some big changes and they paid off.
📚
I'm currently reading something considerably safer:
Far from the Madding Crowd | Thomas Hardy
which is taking me for, like, ever... but where's the rush?!
💻
And as those of you who were still very kindly, indulgently, politely checking in this time last year may remember, I am still somewhat in the thralls of a clutch
of productivity/decluttering gurus << I'm not having that argument with myself again. YouTube, then, is where I get a lot of my viewing fodder these days.
That said, of course, while it's all well and good to fall down the sort of rabbit holes that lead to you cultivating a weekly meal planner (which by the way I live and die by; no regrets) and sticking motivational stickers in your Filofax (in the manner of Queen Marquita of At Home with Quita who remains one of my favourites: her voice alone is pure ASMR...), and laminating a chart of weekly housework chores (guilty, m'Lud), I've become quite aware of what I'm calling the Cult of Drudgery on social media.
What is the Cult of Drudgery, I hear you ask?
Well, reader, within the CoD it seems that every day of a YooChoober's life entails them uploading a pseudo documentary in which they talk you through every facet of their decision-making process before "going ahead and" cleaning their kitchen counters/taking out the bins, power-washing the patio/decluttering their pantry/"switching out" one gadget or one acrylic storage box for another, to the point where it seems like housewifery is literally all they do and where are their partners in all of this?!
I mean, we didn't push through a century of suffrage and feminism for some overly chirpy Canadian girl to tell us that ultimately our duty in life is to clean and empty our sinks before bed or die, amiright?!
Life is too short and as long as Kim and Aggie wouldn't send Environmental Health in about the state of your counters then you're probably doing OK at life and you don't have to spend every day armed with a bottle of Microban checking off chores like some sort of downtrodden 1950s Stepford spouse.
Likewise, a word to the productivity poppets of YouTube: while a life reset once in a while is probably a necessary expression of self-care – a time to regroup and recalibrate – if you're resetting on a weekly basis then surely you've given yourself no time to let all your new systems and routines kick in.
And all you're doing is navel-gazing and reflecting when ultimately you can only truly move forwards.
Which is probably how I came to scrap most of the content I'd written over the last few months while coming to the ultimate conclusion that, ironically, I need to find a system, a process, a formula, a structure that works with the way my life is now, so that the blog is a part of a routine without overwhelming it, and taking up more time and causing more stress than it deserves.
Leave that one with me.
---
Until then, allow me to paraphrase Slade:
Look to the future, now; it's only just beguuuuuuuuun...
...if indeed any of you are still out there in the ether, poised with bated (and possibly expiring) breath for my words of wisdom...
Yes, it is me.
How are you doing? Fair? Middling? Muddling along?
There's a scene in one of my favourite seminal teen-angst films, Pump Up the Volume (hey, no judgment, growing up a teen in the nineties was hard, y'all) when the main character, Mark, under his alias of Happy Harry, pirate radio DJ, comes back onto the air after stopping his broadcasts under duress, and his followers are immediately rapt.
I'm under no illusion that me posting after almost a year of this:
will have the same effect.
But I couldn't have let the last eleven months pass by without offering some sort of commentary... some sort of insight, borne of contemplation, consideration and extensive navel-gazing.
So here it comes:
WTAF?
2020 has been the year that just keeps taking.
So much has been lost.
So many have been lost.
It says something about the state of affairs when the best thing to have happened this year was one (comparatively compos mentis) septuagenarian beating out another (deluded, nonsensical) septuagenarian to run the most influential country in the Western world.
Thank heavens for small mercies. And women like:
oh and:
...We had such high hopes for the year, as well.
Ahhhh, 2020: synonymous with clarity of vision, all positive things.
Ha!
No.
It appears the universe had other ideas.
So many times over the last few months I've wanted to commit pen keyboard to paper screen and in essence brain-dump even just a piddlin' few of the thoughts that have passed through my warped lil' walnut... but the irony was, I couldn't find the words. There are no adequate words. OK, WTAF has come close but... it's not exactly original, is it.
clogging up the subterranean tunnels of my mind (there's a lot of mixed metaphor and imagery going on there: I'll just let you untangle that for a moment).
I felt that anything I wrote would either be too steeped in sobriety (the emotional kind, obviously... hurrah for wine); or much too glittery and much too glib.
In writing this post when we've not even crossed over to the Other Side of this absolute Sh*t Show of a Year, I still risk swaying into either of these camps.
And, perhaps too frequently after thirty years, I think back to the criticism levelled at me by my Year 8 English teacher that I could, and can, sometimes be flippant.
No, Mrs Hay. What you're gleaning from my stunning works of literature is not flippancy but a finely-tuned, Chandler-Bing-like tendency to turn to humour whenever sh*t gets a bit too real.
Like now.
There comes a point when the elusive blogger (once a blogger, always a blogger, let's be honest) must raise her head above the proverbial parapet and say a long, drawn-out...
and embrace the fact that political commentaries, and state-of-the-nation-type responses to, er, well, the state of the nation are not my bag, and just say what I probably would have said anyway, in my own inimitable, quirky way.
Because hasn't one of this year's key messages been:
Quirk from home, if you can...
?
See, you missed me, didn't you? Me and my terrible puns and my proliferation of gifs and my derailed trains of thought...
I'll be honest. I've missed it too.
So.
*Pause as qb rolls up her sleeves, clears her throat and says the word 'Right' decisively about seven times just to prove she means business*
Here it is. In case you were wondering how I've fared over the last few months.
qb's guide to surviving 2020
1. Embrace your introvert self...
One of the absolute benefits of the pro-level of introversion that I've attained in 42 years is the ability to subsist, survive and essentially thrive on my own.
And here's the thing that few may believe: I'm really, really OK with this.
I'm not even 'settling' any more. I am revelling in the fact that when I get home, my time is my own, and how I choose to spend it (or waste it) is, more or less, mine alone.
Being told on a loop to stay at home, limit exposure to other people, stay two metres apart has actually tapped into a part of me that I never before realised needed to be acknowledged. For a good while, I had that space that I'd been craving for quite some time. And I was, and still am, at liberty to shoot eye-daggers of fire at anyone who dares step into my bubble.
2. But not too much, you crazy hermit crab.
Even introverts need exposure to other humans; because sometimes your own mind is a dangerous place to play (especially if you try the see-saw...).
Towards the end of first lockdown Paranoia came to visit and brought its little bedfellow, Anxiety, with it. (In spite of social distancing. Rude.)
Admittedly much of the anxiety was later attributed to a hormone imbalance (too much thyroxine) but... at the time it felt like the World versus Quirky; like everything needed to be taken out of my hands because I was too incompetent to handle it.
Hormones, eh?!
Anyway. This time round I'm far more emotionally equipped. I'm on a stable dosage now. I'm structuring my days in the manner of many, many earnest productivity gurus (gurii?) on YouTube (more on that later).
And I can also spend valuable, structured time in the office for that sweet, sweet hit of human contact, banter, and the slow painful death of any (OK, most of my) paranoid delusions.
3. You are a creature of routine...
There are things you learn about yourself when you have to make significant changes to your way of life. When you have to stop thinking of Mondays as the day you go to trampolining; Tuesday as choir day, and the last Thursday of the month as the day you spend two hours throwing back curly fries and expensive wine in your favourite pub, because all of these things have been taken away from you.
These markers may have been the only things by which you have distinguished one week from the next. Now time is fluid. Meaningless. Elastic. And many other clichés besides.
Preach, Mariah.
But, you know, it's OK.
It's hard to admit that actually you don't miss all of the markers. That perhaps filling your week with All the Things was actually slowly killing you a tiny bit, and that in taking those things away you need to find new markers of time.
Or maybe – and more importantly – you don't need to do All the Things all the time.
I'm not saying I wouldn't go back to these things if they came back in the forms in which I knew them.
But virtual trampolining isn't a thing (well, not a safe thing anyway), and virtual singing, sadly, means spending more time in front of a screen, in the same room in which you may have just spent nine or so hours grappling with somebody's comedy syntax in a book on ancient embroidery practices.
And you no longer have the commute, for better or worse, every day, to separate work-day from personal-day. Oh, sure, you can take yourself off for a ten-minute walk to Costa to remove your brain from the work realm, but you will just be coming back to the same place, geographically. So you need to build in your own separations. Build new routines.
I wish I could say I got more into cooking during lockdown. I got a little bit more into cooking.
I wish I could say I channelled my spare time into new hobbies.
I played the uke again a couple of times but given I could often hear my neighbours downstairs having their daily domestic, I could only imagine what my other neighbours would make of me playing 'My Dog Has Fleas' until I mastered more complex fingering.
I've since taken to using and spinning on a balance board for ten minutes daily. It may make noise, it may not. I no longer care. That's my ten-minute separation. Done.
Shortly before first lockdown I became a victim of the Google Marketing Gambit.
Yes. I am Google's Fool. Google's B*tch.
I bought a Mini Hub Nest thing... one of these little round dudes.
And I love my Assistant unapologetically. Even when he says, rather abruptly:
Sorry. I don't understand.
Or
Sorry. I don't know how to do that yet.
Or when it gives me sass when I ask it to start off my Housework routine (more on that shortly).
Or when it sets a 15-minute timer when I clearly asked for 50 minutes.
The thing about Google's routines is that they help you to bookmark your day without you having to clock-watch. All the best YouTube gurus (again... gurii?!) recommend that twenty minutes is a long-enough time to do a spot of housework. So I now say the word "Housework" and Google both sets me a twenty-minute timer and plays my Spotify Housework mix playlist. Genius.
Except when Google backchats me and tells me there's nothing he'd rather do.
OK, who pays the bills in this household, mister?
But in all honesty, sad though it may seem, chatting to an AI device kept me company.
And now he tells me when it's five minutes before Only Connect (my new Monday marker) or five minutes before my Mindful Self-Compassion session (Wednesday's marker); he wakes me up with nature sounds, and sends me to sleep with ocean sounds.
I'm also abusing the heck out of the digital wellbeing functions on my devices in a laughable attempt to curb the amount of time I spend scrolling through photos of felt pigs on Facebook (all oink!), or watching people lipsync impeccably to old episodes of The Office on Tiktok.
Cole Anderson-James: I mean you, you absolute freakin' genius.
Because, let's face it, who hasn't fallen down a TikTok rabbit hole at some point this year?
4. ... and you can break those routines at any time.
Why yes, a woman of a certain age living alone may well find herself aligning with Sheldon Cooper and his many, extreme, idiosyncratic tendencies. So while setting those routines helps give structure to an otherwise fluid and nebulous days, the fluidity works both ways: you can change up your routines at any time.
The crucial thing to remember is that none of us knows what we're doing.
So we've followed the regulations and restrictions as best we can to avoid becoming what Miranda Priestly would term an incubus of viral plague and as a result have had to make snap decisions about our daily lives with next to no notice. This does not always sit well with creatures of habit but even we can learn to adapt. We're organised, in our way, but we're not robots and as such we can of course evolve.
As a result of the need to change and adapt, and to review the routines to which I was once so closely bound, I've finally found myself doing the things I should have been making time for before a devastating pandemic took over our lives.
I'm reading again. This was kickstarted back in the summer when Ma, Pa and I spent five blissful days – post-first-lockdown – by the sea, during which it rained a bit, ergo, reading happened.
I'm writing again. Again, this was kickstarted during that same week in the summer. I started dribbling the words of the novel into Word on my tablet, and novelling recommenced.
I've really missed having cause to use this gif...
And I'm cleaning and tidying my flat with more, alarming, regularity these days. I blame The Home Edit. I mean, I watched the series with the sound on low (the shrieking is intolerable: you have been warned), but still ended up decanting my food into nice, neat, pristinely labelled, tessellating containers of which I am very proud; then for some balance started watching Hoarders and Hoarder SOS, which both had the effect of pushing me into even more decluttering, and discovering ClutterBug on YouTube. Followed by many, many other such guru (...ii...?), the details of which I really shall divulge shortly.
Yes, the rabbit holes are vast and endless. But I now own a spray mop and a bottle of fruity Method spray, and of course I have a Housework routine set up on Google Home, so... read into that what you will.
And I have missed people. I've missed hugging people and if you know me you'll know that my poor hugging form in the past ("bloody hell, mind my shoulder!") has made me quite a reluctant hugger. So to miss that was quite a revelation.
One other saving grace of lockdown has been the discovery of weekly sessions run by the Kind Mind Academy, who I mentioned in one of my last posts last year. Mindful Self-Compassion is like online therapy – via Facebook Live – for half an hour, with a short meditation to begin with – a soft landing, as it's called – followed by reflection and discussion on matters of self-compassion and kindness. It's been a real weekly touchstone, and Natalie and I have got a lot out of it.
---
So... that's sort of a summary (albeit a lengthy one) of the last few months.
I could have edited and included photographs, but... y'know what, I CBA. (Sorry.) You got gifs instead.
Now onto the features that I know you've missed (well, perhaps not but I'm throwing them in here anyway for the sake of continuity).
Incidentally in the months I've been away from the blogosphere Blogger has changed somewhat so I've spent a lot of the last couple of days of drafting hunting for features (like the gif embedding function that happily made itself known to me quite soon). I dunno, you turn your back for eleven months... I've all but forgotten how to do this.
How I used to do it on the weekly is a mystery to me.
Perhaps that's why I stopped...
---
So, this year I have been mostly
Reading 📚
The Salt Path | Raynor Winn
An autobiographical account of a couple who, having lost everything and begun to deal with the husband's degenerative illness, decide to tackle the South West Coast Path. As yer do.
Real Life Organizing | Cassandra Aarssen aka ClutterBug
Forever and Olé | Georgina Carter Pickard
An absolute favourite this year, bias or no bias: my little buddy Georgiepants has done an absolutely epic job with this, her account of her life in Spain.
Do/Pause | Robert Poynton
Word of warning: don't read this after having read the following book on my list. Cue barely suppressed frustration over the disproportion of female–male opinions sought and cited...
Invisible Women | Caroline Criado Perez
Let the bile of injustice rise readily in your throat, women.
(Ew. Lovely imagery, there, qb...)
No but seriously. This is a must-read and I don't say that lightly.
Indistractable | Nir Eyal
Yeah, I'm still working quite hard to put all of Eyal's teachings into practice but it's a lovely idea in theory... Just try working in an open plan office.
Watching 📺💻
Oh lawdy, brace yourselves..
All the things.
I've been watching all the things.
I'll start with the absolute highlight of this year.
Schitts Creek
In summary: Very rich-and-famous family becomes very poor very fast and has to hole up in comically-monikered backwater town, where they try to fit in and rebuild their lives, with mixed results. It's been done before... but not like this.
A slow burner for much of the first season, it started to get really good around season two.
By season six, it was absolutely heckin' epic and I was making marriage proposals to more or less all of the characters.
Except maybe Roland.
Sorry, Roland.
Oh and it's fair to say that none of us will ever hear 'Simply the Best' again without a tiny tear coming to our eyes.
If you know, you know...
All hail the Levy family eyebrows, I say.
The Queen's Gambit
... Which I've only just got into but I am intrigued. It's so so weird.
But Anya Taylor-Joy is just such a... well, Joy to watch. She was also superb in Emma which is very possibly the last film I went to see, with Charlie and chums, before the first lockdown: she was brutal and nuanced.
You Me Her
The last-ever season of this underrated series 'dropped' (as the youff say) this month and I will be genuinely sad to see it go. Set in Portland, it revolves around the quirky relationship between struggling couple Emma and Jack, and graduate Izzy, who become in essence a throuple. There's a lot of quipping, a lot of self-consciousness and a lot of heart.
At least, unlike Friends from College, it was allowed to come to an acceptable conclusion.
Oh, FfC, I'll miss you most of all... you had such potential. You had Keegan-Michael Key.
... as seen also in Pitch Perfect 2, for context...
You had Fred Savage tap-dancing.
What's not to love?!
New Girl
...up to a point. Then I'll admit I just got bored, especially when Jess and Nick was allowed to happen after all that tension. That ol' trope.
Rebecca
No, not this one. This one, incidentally, is fab on TikTok.
This one:
I know, the Hitchcock version was a classic. Hammy, but a classic.
But give the 2020 reboot its due... it isn't all bad.
Lily James is less simpering as the Second Mrs de Winter.
Kristin Scott Thomas is barbaric as Danvers though perhaps not quite as creepy as the original.
And while we're on a KST tip...
Military Wives
I'm pretty sure you all know my fairly effusive, fangirlin' feelings towards Gareth Malone by now...
I'll admit that upon seeing a trailer for this film I was a little
Catherine O'Hara gives epic gif face. Always.
I mean, a film based on the series he anchored – The Choir: Military Wives – and they wiped him out of the entire narrative?!
Rude.
Then I discovered (on his social media, I think) that the good man wanted it that way, that he wanted the story to be about the wives, not about him. And that's how it should be, of course (not that the film wouldn't have been a little more dazzling with him in it...).
Gawd love 'im.
So, with that in mind...
I actually really rather enjoyed the film. I mean, KST versus Sharon Horgan as the grande dames of the Military Wives choir?
That was a winner.
The obvious but still charming 'discovery of the girl with the beautiful voice who doesn't realise she's got a beautiful voice' trope.
An absolutely heart-ripping moment when one wife becomes a widow.
Definitely more surprising than I expected.
Surprisingly.
The Home Edit
Setting aside the aforementioned shrieking, and the unnecessary pandering to celebrities who, if they took ten minutes out of their lives to stop buying multiple toy cars for their toddlers (ugh), could actually spend time tidying and maybe even decluttering their excess of Things... this is a visual treat.
I have mixed feelings about whether or not I even like the presenters (in contrast with the Fab Five of Queer Eye who have empathy pouring out of every orifice): saying, in essence, "hi, your life offends my OCD" is possibly not the way to get a client on board...
We'll gloss over the Hoarders and Hoarder SOS days. Those were some dark times, but they brought me to the delights of YouTubers evangelising on everything from decluttering and keeping a pristine home to how to construct a successful morning routine (coffee, meditation, gratitude journalling... I think I'll just keep to coffee, cornflakes and TikTok for the foreseeable).
So, the hot hits of YouTube for me, for numerous reasons, have been:
Wonderful Canadian Cas makes housework and organising seem... well, fun; she also ends her excerpts with an anecdote that reminds you how brilliantly human and like the rest of us she truly is;
This old soul has a lot of insight and advice on living a more minimalistic, decluttered life. I might not have the time or the inclination to go full minimalist but there's something about her delivery that is instantly calming and encouraging;
Two quite similar young men who both seem to have their heads screwed on, and who deliver short but palatable and entertaining insights into productivity, time management, organisation, all the things that please my pedantic little brain.
Another old soul with a calming, almost soporific delivery that will make you question everything about your busy 9–5 life and make you want to fully commit to bullet-journalling in multicoloured pens.
A recent discovery but another one with a calming delivery and a heck of a lot of plants. I mean, a lot. I turned amateur plant mama in lockdown (with some success: not everything has withered yet), but this girl is next level.
There are more, of course (courtesy of the YT rabbit hole) but that's quite enough to pique one's curiosity. Or, y'know, not.
---
Well, I think I've beffled long enough for one surprise 'hurrah I'm back for an extended special...' but before I go, I must of course share with you a little bit of
Link Love 🔗
Jos, an avid FOQ as well as FOMine, has taken up the considerably weighty mantle of bloggery, and is now publishing very prosaically under the handle yes, ridiculous
Check it out.
---
Well, until the next time the muse bashes down my door and demands that I spend my time doing something other than binge-watching YooChoobaz...
