It's not quite deep and dark December, but it's beginning to feel like it. The streetlights on by 4pm, and last week's storm (slates flying off our office roof like errant fireworks) are both signs that we should be entering that twilight zone of existence where we go to work and return home in the dark.
I spent an unpleasant 2 hours today watching Scotland crash out of the European football championships to a last-minute goal from Italy. It's not the losing that hurts, it's the taking part...
But nobody has died (yet) and the world keeps turning. Funny, that. Every bar in this town at the end of the narrow road to the deep north of Scotland has been full of hopeful fans, all of us bought into the national myth of success-against-the-odds. We should all be tattooed with it at birth.
But maybe it's time we were better equipped to deal with success, rather than to heave sighs of relief at glorious failure. I'd rather spend time worrying about whether my good freen' and his family are safe and well in Phnom Penh than on whether my country is a country.
From the deep north, in the deep winter, a warm welcome to the rest of the globe's bloggers and lovers and fighters and thinkers.
