Authors Electric

"' Begin at the beginning. ' the king said gravely, ' and go on until you come to the end. Then stop .'" I'm thinking a lot about beginnings right now. This is not so much because it's January, though that's natural. I've never been much for New Year's rituals and resolutions. The universe gives not a rat's patootie that we don party hats and make noise at an arbitrary point in our orbit around second-rate Sol on the seedy outskirts of the Milky Way. Jorge Luis Borges pointed out that "time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day - perhaps every hour - is different." Indeed, this January seems very different from the last. It feels more like an end - maybe the end - than a beginning. We've had our cup of kindness for auld lang syne, yet can't forget the blood orange orb rising over Amerca. It's not a new day, but a brutish one ...

How does your garden grow? Dandelions are a curse for gardeners and right here, right now in Ireland, those yellow flowers are popping up all over my lawn. They elbow their way to the surface and push away the grass. Even if you dig them out they leave a muddy patch for the grass to re-colonise and Alfie the dog is likely to dig a fresh hole there as he loves the smell of dandelion roots. Yet, when Alfie and I take a stroll over the field across from our house, those same dandelions are delightful to look at, showing their sunny faces as a reminder that the long wet winter has passed. But can it already be a whole year since the last time they rose up, flowered and shook their seeds into the wind? Perennial pests are a good reminder of our planet completing another solar orbit. I count car and house insurance policies in this category. The annual slap around the head of increasing car insurance premiums, which should surely be falling as I get older, can be mitigated by ...