Merry Christmas!

To all my loyal readers, wishing you a most merry Christmas and a happy new year. Thank you for joining me this past year, you all make the blogging experiment worthwhile. A year and a half, and still going strong!

As for me, I shall be holidaying around Costa Rica for a couple of weeks. Theodore Dalrymple recently described it thus:

In the late stage of British colonialism, for example, the British fondly imagined that they were bequeathing to various African countries institutions that would function in the same way without them as with them. In retrospect, this now seems an almost laughable belief. No better example of this could be had than Uganda, that land that Churchill called ‘the pearl of Africa.’ (Beware of pearls of continents, and above all Switzerlands of continents: for them, special horrors are usually reserved. The only exception to this rule known to me is Costa Rica, the Switzerland of Central America.)

I shall let you know how apt that description seems.

In the mean time, expect posting to be lighter than normal until about January 10 or so, when things will be back to full strength.

Oh, and one final request for you all over the future 12 months - if you think of something funny or interesting about a post, write a comment! I know I have lots of hilarious and awesome readers - the wit and wisdom that you would share with me if we were discussing these matters in a conversation would surely be appreciated by the other readers in blogland.  I imagine that few readers ever appreciate how valuable their comments are until they start a blog themselves. Until their blog hits the big time, at which point the sentiment reverses as the ratio of trolls and spam to real insight becomes unmanageable. But until such time, your comments are like Christmas presents to me, but every day of the year. :)

Yours faithfully,

Shylock