Good morning and Happy New Year to you all! Penelope and I celebrated by welcoming the New Year in Prague, Athens, Bucharest, Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus, not to mention Helsinki, Riga, Sofia, Tallinn, Vilnius as well as Jerusalem and Minsk. And a splendid celebration it was too!
You will have noticed (probably) that the New Year brings a “new” blogging environment; from henceforth all future editions of the Befouled Weakly News will be posted here. The only difference is that we are now using a WordPress template which provides an opportunity for readers to comment on the postings as well as a relatively easy way to search through the archives. I’m not satisfied with the current “theme” yet (the general layout) so you may see some changes in the weeks/months to come but you can rest assured that the content will remain as tediously dull as previously.
What a difference a week makes! This time last week we were enduring freezing Arctic conditions with mountains of snow; this week we are positively basking in almost tropical temperatures. Well, perhaps not quite tropical but definitely and deceptively warmer. That’s what happens when you get a 20 degree temperature swing in a matter of a day or so – the perception is that it’s quite warm when, in fact, it’s still cold! Last week we had temperatures of -15 degrees (Celsius, of course); today the temperature is forecast to reach the lofty heights of +5 degrees C. For those of you working in Fahrenheit, that’s a swing from 5 degrees F to 41 degrees F in a matter of a day or so which, as I say, leaves one with the feeling that it’s tropically balmy outside.