No, not mine.   Although, to be fair, you would be forgiven for thinking so, as it has been a little time since my last post on these pages.  The delay has been entirely due to the alleged `festive season` - now thankfully behind us for another year - and to ongoing negotiations with the Regulator, OffBlog, as to whether this blog should be allowed to continue in its present form.   Those negotiations have concluded happily and so I am now fired up to resume pretty much where I left off.

So here goes.

And it saddens me in a way to begin this year`s rants with yet another critique of the BBC News.  I sit down at lunchtime and the news comes on and in my naivete I imagined there would firstly be reports about the Brexit fiasco, the Mexico wall shenanigans, the snow deluge in continental Europe, the Government`s attempts to make sense of Universal Credit and so on, but no.  None of that.

Instead the first ten minutes of this 30 minutes news bulletin were taken up on the subject of Andy Murray and the fact that he might be having to bring his distinguished tennis career to a close, given the medical problems he has suffered in recent times.  Now I have every sympathy with his situation and a good deal of admiration for his achievements on the tennis courts of the world.  So my complaint is not about Andy Murray, far from it, but it is yet again with the BBC and their warped sense of priority.

We had a potted history of Murray`s development and playing career, we had reporters from Dunblane to Wimbledon, we had effusive Twitter and e-mail testimonials from tennis greats past and present.   Had I caught the news half way through this main item then I could well have imagined that poor Andy Murray had passed away.   Thankfully, for his sake, Mark Twain`s quote is entirely accurate.