Jock's Jottings

(with apologies to Ure/Geldof) It's pretty commonplace to think we have just about managed to survive a particularly awful year as we say farewell to 2022. Globally still we've had waxing and waning Covid, and a number of other biological threats; a new vicious war, this time right on our doorstep, in Ukraine; more sabre rattling from China over Taiwan; we are threatening our one home planet just as much as ever, if not more; and just as in every previous sort of crisis, a tiny few will become even more wealthy from exploiting it, playing it like a game. Whether we can lay all our economic woes at the feet of the belligerent Putin or seek better reasons closer to home in the failures of our own governments over the past few years, 2022 has witnessed prices rise faster than during most of our lives, households pushed to decisions about whether to heat or eat, and whether, indeed, they can afford to maintain the very roof over their heads.  In Britain we've seen two governmen...

 It's seventeen years since I first had a blog, here on Blogger, back in the days when there were only a couple of places to host a blog without doing lots of heavy lifting with your own server and keeping software up to date and so on. In that time I've had a couple of reasonably useful sites, but eventually went down that rabbit hole and played first with Drupal and then with Wordpress on self hosted systems and ended up spending more time neck deep in code and databases and so on and less and less writing anything. Of course, we've got sires like Medium and Substack now, but I want something that may turn out to be temporary while I decide where I want to end up, and since I have a Google account, I may as well try Blogger out again, hopefully to get me kickstarted on writing again without worrying too much about themes a and widgets and so on. So stay tuned. I hope to put together a collection of shorter comments on the goings on in the world day-to-day but more importa...