More evidence of comically early spring: daffodils dancing in the sun.

A group of daffodils growing in a flowerbed in late-winter sun, with a patio behind.

Pending the deal’s publication on Wednesday, it appears that Sunak has offered to keep Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) aligned with European standards if the DUP returned to Stormont.

Best news since Brexit, if true.

It’s still January. It’s the northern hemisphere. So why is this rose flowering? I’ll be wanting to prune it in about a month.

‘Oh rose thou art sick’… But the climate, not the rose.

Currently reading: Monument Maker by David Keenan 📚

I’ve read a few of his before, and they’re all strange. This one may be the strangest yet, but I’m only about 40 pages into a huge book.

I didn’t have China Miéville co-writing a novel with Keanu Reeves on my 2024 bingo card, but here we are.

Currently reading: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka 📚

My current book-club book. Shouldn’t be any trouble to finish it by the 18th.

This year I’m going to do my book posts Micro.blog-style, using its Bookshelves feature. We’ll see how they go.

I read 27 books in 2023; just over one a fortnight, which seems faster than it felt at the time. And I posted 111 times, with the following monthly breakdown:

Month Posts
Jan 16
Feb 11
Mar 5
Apr 10
May 6
Jun 1
Jul 7
Aug 13
Sep 12
Oct 9
Nov 9
Dec 12

With my yearly theme of ‘Getting Out and Connection’, I’ll try to put a few more posts out into the world in 2024.

Happy New Year everyone!

Hackney Christmas lights

What the hell is this shit? Tried to open a link at CNN and I get this response, in Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Brave? I don’t even have it installed!

A screenshot of Mac OS Safari on the CNN website saying I should change my privacy settings if I want to see the page. ‘This functionality is required fro privacy legislation in your region’, it says. Then it gives instructions for disabling the block ‘in the Brave Browser’.