Those of you reading this blog on a semi-regular basis will have guessed. I find myself quite busy these days and experiencing a serious shortage of a quintessential ingredient to blogging: time. Between the holidays, approaching like the light at the end of the tunnel which one knows all too well to be a train, the complete rebuilding of my computer – it had been dragging its tired chips for much too long – and the bloody battle for domination endlessly fought by my work and normal lives, the remaining window for story-crafting and picture editing is impossibly narrow.

Fear not. There is more to come. Maybe I must learn to make my stories shorter. But shortening is a lengthy process. As the disputed quote says it so well, I didn’t have time to write a short story, so I wrote a long one.