Awning Has Broken

An Atlantic swell skips and scuds boisterously through and over my swinging, drying string vests. I watch from the window of suburbanforest's winter holiday quarters - a 12'6" Swift Tahiti berthed precariously on the sodden Eire coastline - as laundry items flap limply on a length of blue baler twine, as grey rollers break, grey as my Damart H-Fronts, break on the rickety rocks barely ten yards below. By golly jingos, this Paddy's 49% Proof Export Malt is pure fire.
Now I know I should have listened to Wally and packed spare Long Johns and extra blankets.
The donkey is pressed tight against a leeward wall, looking none the worse for wear after a fairly long haul back from Mrs. Paintefell's victuallers and general store-cum-hostellry up at Crappanoolan's Crossing with a cart load of carrots and two bags-for-life full to the brim with provisions for our fortnight away from Hell.
Theresa Paintefell, the incumbent's flame-haired daughter, alerted me to news from God's Own County by pointing dolefully to her computer screen in the shop's "internet cafe", a dial-up modem one-machine affair crammed in behind damp, faded Burren snap postcard carousels and piles of unsold cerise mohair shawls in cellophane. Ebor Forestry's defamatory biliousness and blatant link-dropping cowardice will have to be dealt with in 2008, once I am sober and dry. I read my emails and picked through forwarded post, only to find Forestry Commotion had sent me the most amazingly witty, novel, imaginative Chrimbo missive, in the shape of a card...containing a packet of tree seeds. What a fabulous way to save money and show they are really thinking about forestry in a big way for the new year. I look forward to Easter with rabid anticipation.
Dr. Connie Furze will be joining me for a couple of days to see out the old year, along with our old pal Middiameter. I will try to get them all to post something if we can all get on the cart and up to Crappanoolan before dark.
And what a year it has been. Watch out for one of those What A Year It Has Been supplements in your daily paper.
I personally cant wait to be reminded about it all.
Going forward (as all the finest pig-faced, stinking, clodwitted bureaucrats are wont to utter these miserable days), going forward into 2008, I am sure suburbanforest will carve a pretentious, garish niche for itself as probably The Second Best Forestry Blog in Yorkshire. We will continue to write drivel, second only to the drivelier drivel of its one rival e-rag.
But for now we return to the essential business of self-anaesthetised oblivion. If you have been, thank you for paying attention. Ho. Ho. Ho.