Alive & Kicking...

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It's the end of another gorgeous day here in Fairview Heights: a bucolic day of tree-cutting, garden tidying and dog-sitting. Oh, that it were the same everywhere, but alas, no. The world continues apace on what sometimes seems to be an ever-downward trajectory, where the only currency is, well, currency, and everything else would appear to be subservient to Mammon.

A large - city-large - chunk of the Conger ice-shelf in Antarctica has parted company with the continent, Russian bombardment has now reached Lviv - fractionally outside NATO territory - and the world's economy is on the slide into another Great Depression. Which kind of takes the edge off today's little bubble of positivity, but hey-ho, as my old, now sadly deceased, Russian friend, Sacha used to say when asked how he was: "I'm alive!"

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