Then ten years passed like a flash ...

I have been running this blog for a decade. Our first post, April 1 2003, was the following:

Reasons for Invading Switzerland

1. We don’t like them
2. Nobody at all nice likes them
3. Their neighbours can’t stand them
4. They are in fact the Axis of the Not at All Nice
5. The Pofessor has a personal interest in the overthrow of the current régime and therefore we ought to do it
6. The Food and Drug Authority considers chocolate a dangerous substance which needs to be kept in safe hands
7. We are convinced on evidence we consider adequate that they have stockpiled weapons of mass destruction at Lindt-Sprüngli Gbmh
8. Nobody needs to tell Tony until we’ve started shooting

We will assemble on the borders with placards in small neurotic letters

“nobody likes you, yah, yah, yah”
“call that a national literature?”
“put that in your fondue and smoke it”
“Jung was a loony”
“four hundred years of democracy and all you produce is the cuckoo clock”
“Müsli’s no Üsli”
“Calvinism is the Root of all Evil”

If there is NO FIRM COMMITMENT TO SURRENDER BY THE FORCES OF EVIL within 24 hours then we will invade with maximum prejudice.

After that, we settled after that to chronicles of small beer, but at the time I think we were fairly cross about contemporary politics, not without reason. Fast forwarding by a decade, Godmama is achieving wonders: I’ve gilded the corona for the bed, which looks terrific, albeit as camp as all get out, we have several shades of grey on, or about to go on, the walls, Tony has put up  a dado rail, which has been undercoated. I will have to wash the muslin for the bed curtain, which has become mysteriously grubby, but that is probably to the good since it seems to be a bit more starched than we actually want.  We are within sight of the room's being sorted out, and very fabulous it will be. Also fast forwarding by a decade,the Professor was talking to a friend of ours who is both richer and more techno, who was mentioning that his fridge talked back. What it says, I gather, is 'I need to be defrosted' or some such, but the field is open for more elaborate commentary. 'Isn't that your third gin? 'Put that chocolate bar down, and step away'; or a more general, 'think what you're doing to yourself'. The latter might be the most likely since it would require less effort from the manufacturers and, given natural wastage as people opened their fridges and went berserk upon being corrected, increase the number of fridges bought. However, the events of the last decade seem to have brought us significantly nearer to redefining Lindt as an Axis of Evil.