And thus January comes to an end, and a particularly damp and dreary end at that. The sky bleeds like someone’s made a botched attempt at amateur surgery on our once glorious firmament. I’m going to be honest, it’s been a pretty dire month as January’s go. I usually adore rain but there can be too much of a good thing, nor has the ambient temperature come anywhere close to it’s seasonally appropriate winter chill. It’s been almost offensively mild (though my electricity bill will no doubt change my view on this in due course.) On top of this I have spent the balance of this month gripped by a vague and malignant malaise of spirit and soul. A cocktail of general-all-purpose fatigue, listlessness and the continued manful battle to not vomit everywhere. It has prompted me to actually get round to registering a the local health centre. As you read this I will most likely be being poked and prodded by a crack team of physicians, chirurgeons, quacks, apothecaries and shamans. After their examination they will, to a (wo)man, declare “Well Mister Verbumancer you seem to be perfectly healthy, if somewhat clinically dead.”

You know, standard January fare.

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Today is the first day of Two Thousand and Fourteen. The day has been cold and grey, the sun a wan and sickly thing. The gloom has pervaded throughout the entire day and so has the rain. rain so persistent and unrelenting that one would be forgiven for thinking that the world is crying; mourning the passing of Two Thousand and Thirteen. The world must go on, even though its old friend is now gone. There is something comforting about rain and cloud, something reassuring, something old and dependable. And that is a good thing to have when confronted by the myriad of possibilities that lay before us all. The beginning of a thing is always the most terrifying, the most monstrous and insurmountable. For to begin a thing we must overcome the mountain of inertia and haul ourselves up from the very bowels of the potential energy well. But once that’s done? Then it’s a downhill slope. Things get easier. Either that or you encounter an unforeseen co-interaction or strange quantum phenomenon and everything either catches fire or ends up filled with gribbly abominations from the Before Time. Swings and roundabouts really.

Other things once begun continue, ad infinitum, such is their inertia that they cannot be stopped by conventional means. They merely continue, because that is the way things are. So here we are in the first day of the first month, let us visit the first of the planets, let us visit Mercury.

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