Happy New Year

Back home in Berlin, and sick as a dog. My gang came down with a selection-box of diseases over the Christmas in Ireland. Returning half-conscious to Berlin - coughing and hawking our way through airports, train stations, cafés and public toilets - we spread our plagues in a mighty swathe across Europe. So if civilisation is consequently snuffed out, sorry about that.

(The Plain People of the Internet: Ah! Is that a rare reference there to the five wives and forty children he is rumoured to  have stashed away in Berlin? Make a note...)

So on a human level, I and all I love start 2009 utterly banjaxed. But as a writer (far more important, natch), my year has got off to a nice start. The New York Times has just printed a piece by me. The piece is probably funnier if you have read all of US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's official bailout statements over the past six months. (But, you know, don't. It's too high a price to pay to get a gag.)

I'll put it up on the site here, once the New York Times has had a fair run at it. But meanwhile here's their version. They even commissioned a cartoon from R. O. Blechman, which is a heck of an honour. (Blechman is seventy-eight now, and won an Emmy for his animated film of Stravinsky and Ramuz's theatre thingy, The Soldier's Tale.)

Oh, and a happy, happy, HAPPY, HAPPY New Year to you all.

(The eloquent photo above is borrowed from PawsAroundChicago.com. They give pets lifts. Oh you laugh and call it decadence, but it is only through such - not entirely necessary, yet welcome - innovations that civilization advances. I don't know the name of the photographer. A haunting picture, suffused with empathy and a deep understanding of suffering, it is possible it is a self portrait.)