Dead air

These strange dead days between festival and typical, watching the world's odometers click over to 000 000 because something-or-other.

You drop your resolutions into the silence, a silver teaspoon to see how deep it is, ear turned to the distant ping as it hits, one cat-and-dog, two cat-and-dog but it never comes, of course, because the year is coming at you with both ends of the wind-tunnel wide open, leap for the quotidian roar in your ears, tax, your mother, piles made of all the wrong paper, bag for the charity shop in the hall.

Why are you doing that, asks Pluvialis, because there are Other Things to be doing and she has half-an-eye cocked to my proven tendency to sand the edges off my ambitions until all that's left is a Hummel figurine of a little boy in a blue overall feeding a chicken.

I put on a grown-up voice but she doesn't buy it. Hummel, smash.

*This wonderful portrait of a tumbleweed considering its existence by Ed Deas.