This can all be blamed on a yoga pose designed to release emotions and break the dam holding everything back.

I am eating my first mince pie of the season along with a very cheeky morning glass of Beaujolais. Tuer le ver!

Mince pies actually taste better than I remember. I’ve always had a keen sense of taste and smell, but perhaps everything has been heightened this year, when we are supposed to be checking for any changes. It feels like I was in overdrive all year, pretending, working, giving time in exchange for money and meaning. And now – the quiet time. It’s so hard to be still, but the lack of shouting, of trucks, or of cars testing out their newly installed turbo chargers is like a blessing, even if I can hear my neighbors shouting at each other sometimes. Do they ever go out? They have a dog – I think. Yet, it’s NYC. So while we did say hello and introduce once, that’s been it. Different from London, where I knew the two neighbours above me, and said hello, and drank wine with them. The downstairs neighbour sold their flat, and then rich people bought it, renovated, and sprayed my flat with dust…but that’s another story. I think I need another pie now.

It’s quiet, and calm, and it looks like a weather maker – one of the blue sky days that invites a storm. But for now it’s cold and quiet and there are sparrows on my fire escape.

I think about leaving the city, like nearly everyone with money has done, except I don’t have money, and I’m not sure it would be any better. I’ve got a chest cold – I hope – and I’m tired of all the fear and restrictions – but. Sometimes it seems as though these days are meant to present us with moments, and we find them, or we don’t.

These problems are nothing, though. Nothing compared to the people suffering, who have lost loved ones, who now, due to megalomaniac tantrums, are due to lose their unemployment checks – perhaps the only thing keeping a roof over their heads. Food banks at record numbers, both here and in the UK. Is there a virus of idiocy that has only affected English speakers? Or is it that the propaganda machine was so oiled in both the US and the UK? A lie in a gilt frame so much more appealing than the truth in a torn shirt. The chain store disease that put so many coffee shops out of business at one point. But they’ve got a logo! That shop across the way is only selling coffee. Plain.

But to return to the latest manufactured crisis, like trucks and their drivers in lines without food or facilities, waiting to cross the Channel, or young people wanting, needing a job, sending out their resumes, because that’s the American dream, right? It’s all up to you. Meanwhile those at the top say it’s a choice between finance and keeping your grandparents alive, before they go off on holiday to ski, or golf. To keep your people alive! Isn’t that the barebones minimum of leadership? Or is American leadership more the variety where you fire everyone until there is nothing left, but the last remnants of fools desperate for money and power, secretly suspecting their own mediocrity means this is their only hope.

How strange it must be.

And the Citizen app tells me of people shooting each other, cars flipped over, stabbings, fires, assaults.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have miles to go before I sleep.

Isn’t that it?