Flowers on Pluto

I think I may have mentioned this; in fact I’m sure I have: I hate this time of year! It’s not so much the psychotic hysteria by which the whole of Western civilisation worships that monstrous, red-suited neo-pagan deity (“Have you been naughty or nice? If nice you get PRESENTS; if the former, you SUFFER ETERNAL DAMNATION”, or at least you won’t get your laptop/xbox/camera/phone/whatever, which, I suppose, amounts to the same thing after all the hype).  It’s not even the constant regurgitation of decades-old pop songs that have long been bled of all the emotional relevance we enjoyed when such things were fresh and exciting. No, this year it’s the complete lack of light and colour that gets me down. On Boxing Day the temperature rose enough above zero for me to escape the log cabin and explore the post-apocalyptic wasteland of downtown Totton. There was little movement in the ice-encrusted park save for the occasional isolated zombie (like me). The sky was three shades of uniform grey partially obscuring what passes for a pale sun these days, leeched of all colour and warmth lying low in the sky reminiscent of a dusty 40 Watt bulb in an empty warehouse. Like the eponymous flowers on Pluto, I turned a frozen face to the sky desperately trying to catch the last tired, stray photon from a dim and distant star. Depressed I hurried back to my long suffering wife and started thinking about starting this blog. It’s not that I’m getting old and grumpy (no, really!); it’s that I know that are better places out there than England in December where people are alive in a land of light and colour and Vitamin D. We fly out on January 4. As before, I’ll keep this blog going if anyone wants to come with us vicariously (but mostly to help my ailing memory remember what it is I’ve actually done while I’m there).
Oh yes, and Merry Christmas!