The Hindu Festival of Light, Diwali, begins today - blessings be upon you.
2020 foresight seems to imply some positive changes for 2021.
A vaccine for Covid-19 will change the narrative of the pandemic.
The four year uncertainty of the Brexit process will find a resolution changing a general uncertainty into a more specific one.
The UK is following the USA with the beginnings of a push back against the extremes of populism.
The national football team of Scotland will be playing in their first major tournament in over two decades.
However, there's a sense of crumbling around the projects instigated by Dominic Cummings over the past year. It seems that he has been consistently insistent that any computer systems produced by the EU should be ditched in favour of a new model produced in house in this country by his own team. It transpires that this has not been an entirely successful way to proceed.
The most recent bombshell has been the release of this letter (whose existence HMRC initially denied) from Peter McSwinney of Agency Sector Management. It clearly tells HMRC in no uncertain terms that the new Brexit customs system will not be ready ready for another year at least and that trade could be paralysed as a result.
This is only exacerbated by the news coming out of Felixstowe.
The wholly dismaying aspect to this muddle is that this is even before every item has to be checked through the new customs regulations with tariffs being added, etc, etc with no working computer system available to help other than CHIEF - see above.
Furthermore, the article notes that 11,000 containers of government-procured PPE is clogging up the port. This will explain why the supported accommodation in which my mother lives has never received any during the whole of the pandemic.
And there is a further twisted little nugget of information that highlights a connection with an old friend of Brexit. Who would have thought that something connected with Chris Grayling would collapse into chaos.
There is also a rumour that the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is considering a scheme to persuade consumers to start spending again after the current Lockdown Lite 2.0. It will be called Eat Out to Help Out 2: Dine Harder.
There has been some very happy family news. Helen, daughter to Ian, and therefore step-daughter to my sister Linda, has just given birth to her second child. This photograph shows number one son, Reggie, gazing in awe at his new brother, Freddie.
Glasses have been raised in toast around the family.
This is a wonderful summary of the attitudes to the cuisine available in the world that I was born into although I have a couple of quibbles based on local circumstances.
In Liverpool, Chinatown was a source of Chinese food for its indigenous population and for those who were happy to be venturesome despite the rumours about cats and rats. It also provided a refuge for a curry house which my dad would frequent with work friends presumably re-living his RAF years in India.
Also, I'd quibble seaweed because of Welsh laverbread. However, its existence did only go to prove (at the time) what an antiquated and peasant nation the Welsh were.
Football joke for those in the know.
Which allows me to note in sadness the passing of Ray Clemence, one of Liverpool's all time great goalkeepers from a golden age of LFC football.
I've caught a number of the Metropolitan Opera's webcasts over the past nine months. I enjoyed and admired the Parsifal and loathed the vulgarity of the most recent productions of Rigoletto and La traviata.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to catch the Akhnaten as I'd missed out when it was shown at FACT some years back and I was absolutely captivated by the production.
Phelim McDermott's response to the mesmeric arpeggios in Glass's music, ostinato-like in their repetitiveness, is to use a team of jugglers to simultaneously toss white balls into the air in intricate patterns of height keeping in absolute precise timing with the music.
Those words do little to capture the physical, visual and emotional dialogue that the movement has with the music but the I found the effect was simple, stark, effective and very beautiful. Visually, too, the presentation is lush in its use of colour and splendour.
Big shout outs to Anthony Roth Costanzo as Akhnaten, Rihab Chaieb as Nefertiti and conductor, Karen Kamensek. I just found it to be astonishingly absorbing and, should ENO revive the production, I would be keen to travel to witness it in person.
