Deep turquoise eyes

I’m sorry to see that Ellis has closed his blog. I’ve enjoyed and admired Ellis’s writing since we were both contributors to Casablanca; I remember he did a piece on the slave trade ostensibly by John Smith, which antedated Tony Benn’s joke at the expense of the Economist by a decade and a half. Unfortunately it also antedated the death of John Smith by a matter of weeks. (To its great credit, Casablanca printed it anyway.)

Anyway, you could be forgiven for thinking that this blog was going the same way, or had already gone; come to that, it would be the obvious conclusion for me to draw myself. Call me Bartleby, but I prefer not to: I’m not closing this blog, and will post again. Admittedly, posting is likely to remain fairly sparse; I’ve been a bit busy lately, and can’t see the situation changing in the next couple of months. But I’ve got something to say about Graham Greene and Corvo, and something slightly less dated about Decent comment on the de Menezes shooting, and something about French supermarkets, and I had this great idea about Bowie’s sax-playing and Kazuo Ishiguro, and I really ought to say something about what I’ve been doing these last few months… Terrors of the earth, I’m telling you. Stand by.

Oh, and a Happy New Year to all my reathe reader of these words. (I’m assuming a solitary reader; I suppose someone could be reading this over your shoulder, in which case the word is ‘readers’.) ¡Hasta luego!