It's odd, is it not, that one emerges from various amorous calamities not just with yet more wisdom stored away for future use, but also various mementos and keepsakes. The best of them all was a delightful portrait of a giraffe following a fun few weeks with a Finnish lady, because she knew it to be my favourite animal. A Vietnamese Parisian (as adorable as she was unpredictable) pressed a brilliantly designed bloke's shoulder bag into my possession. Russian Olga donated a business card that declared her to be a Tractor Martekeer - too close to Kompeer the Meerkat for comfort. An Irish lady in Portugal donated a pair of very dark reading glasses which, it seemed to me, she had been using to frame her CNN view of the world for far too long. A British girl gave me a disposable toothbrush entirely in keeping with the nature of our very brief encounter; and more recently, a Mystery Woman of complex nationality gifted me a Smartphone she didn't want....

I can only surmise that she did so because, like her, the phone is an enigma I have yet to unravel. It didn't help that the charger, the pc connection cable and the user manual were absent from the gift package. But it has been useful in once again confirming my insistence that no pointy-headed geek should ever be allowed anywhere near the marketing and explanation of hitech products.

Allow me to enlarge upon a view I have been expressing with some passion for more than sixteen years. The phone is an RMX 3363, and the internet will tell you everything about the bloody thing from its OS to number of Gs, the range of colours available and where the best price deals are....but not how it works, why it won't send emails, how model numbers fit into a ranging nomenclature of 1 to 5 and how to download the RMX 3363 manual.

"Dare to leap" demands the corporate strapline. It's a challenging suggestion to make when the customer might be leaping into a cave full of vipers, a shallow bucket of shit or a giant vat of steaming Heinz Rats-Arse soup . Anyway, I've just posted onto their Twitter page asking why they imagine their Mission Statement is to confuse the crap out of everyone. This usually has the desired effect; but if it doesn't, the RealMe Sooperfone is going into the recycling bin.

Whatever the Hell happened to elegant simplicity? It is, I know, a rhetorical question - for it was replaced with jargo-bollocks designed for folks with heads so far up their GI tract, they could clean their teeth internally. It's why people tolerate it that mystifies me: but further to yesterday's Slogpost, ours not to be mystified or reason why...ours just to do or die....onward, onward rode the 1in8.

50,000 workers in key health and other vital positions are, as I write, self-isolating at home.

So much for the official garbage.....now for the Real McCoy.

50,000 important infrastructure workers are throwing a sicky because an utterly unreliable diagnosis system says they have a thing called "Covid" - which is, in reality, a pathetic last throw of the dice by a variant of Covid called Omicron that couldn't knock the skin off a rice pudding.

In fact, had it been controlled with management drugs from Spring 2020 and then left to its own devices, some 300,000 Americans would still be alive.

Events and time will not bring those responsible for this to justice; only a forensic piece of first class journalism tying the smears to the fears created by the Big Pharma peers in bureaucracy will nail anyone to the Cross they so richly deserve.

Now here's something shocking for you to consider: with just 2/179ths of the new year gone, the rate of goneness has doubled in the last twenty-four hours.

This is obviously a major emergency situation, and if left untreated will mean that we'll be in 2023 by the 8th of January. So 348 days will have disappeared, and you don't need me to tell you what an economic catastrophe that would be....we are losing days with no new days coming up to replace the days that never happened, and thus, by August 37th, everyone will be 94 years and 42 days old at least.

Accordingly, the Government has no choice but to lock down Time. We are appealing to everyone with a watch or clock to hammer nails into the hands on such devices. A NASA mission has already been launched to the sun, where special heat-resistant rope will be thrown round the star to slow down its passage round the Earth. In this endeavour, we are of course following the science as laid down by emeritus Professor Hillary Klingon, whose ground-breaking research has now shown conclusively that Copernicus was talking through his telescope.

Meanwhile, you must all continue to wear masks while standing up, wash your hands when sitting down, work at home in the office and get your booster boosted as often as possible.