Well, we're here, the final day of tumultuous decade. As a planet and as a species, we could all do with a quieter, softer, next ten years. I'm an optimist, so let's hope so.

To that small, yet perfectly formed body of readers who flit across my blog from time to time, Happy New Year!

One of my friends wrote how she just simply can't stand the UK's lemming like descent into post Xmas shopping madness. With you all the way there.

Problem with shopping is that it's almost seen as a patriotic duty if you're a Brit. Shop the UK out of recession and so on. But of course that was exactly what got us into the mess we're still trying to bail ourselves out of now. That, and the carefree, reckless, spoilt child behaviour of the investment banking community.

Can't bankers be made to sign some kind of register or wear ankle tracking devices like petty criminials do? We need to know just what these self appointed geni are up to. Leave them on their own, and they'll be dumping us with another pile of the soft, brown and smelly to shovel away.

I can live with Xmas; in fact I actually find it quite tolerable....if whoever it is I'm staying with (usually a relative) understands, and they do, that this brooding, Capricorn Goat needs time to himself, or he'll start butting heads.

Time in this context translates into space, which, in it's turn, means I like to roam and to think.

Dorchester, where I stayed this Xmas, met all of my needs and more. On the town's outskirts is the aloof, dominating, yet magnificent Maiden Castle. An enormous, prehistoric hill fort, with some of the steepest ramparts I've seen anywhere, but more remarkable given their antiquity.

I was there with several relatives late on the afternoon of Xmas day, which was certainly, the best time to experience it's moody grandeur, silhouetted as it was against a lowering, cloudy, inky black sky.

Windswept and away from Dorchester, not like a cast out orphan, but almost an occult presence instead. Simply biding it's time, waiting.

Such a ruminating landscape, mysterious, full of hidden energies, with more than something of the night about it.

I was, and remain, transfixed by it.

Be thankful that we're not prickly or sniffy about the English Language. It's untidy, it's oblivious to boundaries, can take root in even the thinnest of soils, totally adaptive to any environment, and generally seems, well, inexhaustible. Simply more fertile.

Do we realise it? Probably not, or if we did, we've forgotten and it needs something to remind us. Like me after reading a dull tract on social media, but one that was fairly well stuffed with new word plums, and they made me remember how ever evolving it is.

Here are those plums. Whether they'll all survive to a healthy old age is any one's guess. All of them inspired by the relatively new discipline of knowledge management (itself, a neologism, and an indefinable one for that), and I'd be stumped if I was asked to say what any of the actually mean. But, it's their vigour and freshness I like, so here's the roll of honour:

• Wiki gardeners
• Idea engines
• Crowdsourcing
• Prediction markets
• Answer market places
• Persistent environment
• Mind share
• Thought leadership
• Sentiment analysis, and what must be a close cousin, Intent analysis

Ten years time and they're mainstream, possibly; ten years time, and they're all but forgotten, probably. I'm simply enjoying the pleasure of witnessing a rudely healthy language generate new terms, new words, new slogans without stopping.

I was among the eight million or so people who stayed at home or delayed their journey into work to listen to the last ever Terry Wogan show on Friday.

"This is it then..." he said, in the moments before he played his last ever song "... the day I've been dreading".

The end of so many things: that odd, strange loyalty that certain people engender, and Terry Wogan is the exemplar here, with a devoted listenership, (including me); of a real friendship, almost physical in it's intensity, even if it was mediated through the democracy of the airwaves; and the end of listening to some one clearly in love with words. Did n't he say on Friday that his show was one of "...badinage and persiflage"?

It was the end of something particularly personal for me. His career spanned my parent's radio life and through mine. They are no longer here. Both dead. In this sense he was the continuum, the overlap. That went on Friday, and that's another reason, I'll miss him.

It's not often I go to the pub, but I was in one today. Five of us threading the conversation with different stories, curious anecdotes, odd facts, and bold rhetorical sweeps. Pub talk.

Female pub talk, I've been told, gets to heart of the matter more or less straight away: " Your boyfriend, how good ?...big ...?"

What did we five men spend thirty minutes chewing over ? Films that have us in tears. And don't expect there to be someone saying it's when it's the final Top Gear show the season cuts to the credits. No, we were listing serious handkerchief movies, like the Incredible Journey, Marley and Me, or Up, and in my case, the film that always has me sniffling, Rabbit Proof Fence.

I'm sat in Jimmy's waiting to get my hair cut. He's busy, talking, and clipping away at someone's hair. Conversation turns to marriage:

"How long you been married?"

"Five years. Together for four before that"

"Ten year's time you're wife won't notice you. My wife she's says to me 'you look nice. Had you hair cut?' 'Yes... a week ago"

This morning I read an article about James Agee, the film critic; my only experience of him, and I realise now to my somewhat shame, was as the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a classic of the Depression era. I'd no idea of his life as a critic, and certainly none of just how wonderful a writer on film he was.

Visionary, insightful, a thoughtful critic, and blessed with great images. Take this one of Buster Keaton's face, so impassive and featureless, that "when he moved his eyes. it was like seeing them move in a statue"; or this one or Orson Welles in the role of Rochester in Jane Eyre "...his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt like gloom...."

I love that image, it's everything you could imagine of Rochester, dark, shadowy, furtive, hidden secrets, off stage mysteries. Great writing, certainly memorable writing depends on people like Agee and the images they mine from their creative depths.

Someone sent me a link to site that specialises in publishing 90 word stories. No more, no less, just 90 words on the button. That's it.

I like the idea: you pluck something out of the air, trap it between your hands, and ultimately mould into a recognisable shape, using the tiniest amount of material. Concision, precision, and a swift conclusion.

The person who forwarded the link on is a gifted writer, a published writer in fact, and one who is more than capable of turning his hand to any one of the numerous literary forms there are. So rustling up a light lunch of no more than 90 words was pretty straightforward for him. In this respect I'm still stuck at the beans on toast stage, whereas he's a Jamie Oliver, whatever is to hand in the fridge, slice it, dice it, whizz it around, and hey presto, filling fare.

His 90 word story is a good one; to be frank, knowing him as I do, I'd be disappointed if it was n't.

Quite unexpectedly, though, I did get a chuckle out of it, (and by the way, here are those 90 words). I saw, elsewhere, a thread of conversation develop around the electric blanket that's mentioned in the story, which could only be American.

Was anyone sued ?

Three weeks since I came back, and I can still smell those corn tortillas cooking even now sat on a sofa in my small West London flat, and see those gorgeous, overflowing heaps of plump red tomatoes and succulent green beans, the mounds of fleshy fruit, ripe, tiny yellow bananas, golden carambolas, generously sized carrots, the juiciest pineapples, carpets of coffee beans drying in the sun.

The chutzpah of the Tory party and their excitable press claque... I can't think of anything to match it in Europe...well, there's Silvio, but he's really in a league of his own, somewhere between denial and disdain. Still, il Cavaliere must be hearing them panting behind him, constantly self-referencing themselves as the Government already. Did I miss an election somewhere ? Did it happen whilst I was asleep ?

Conservative Central Office must be busier than Heathrow, every day there's a new edict or pronouncement cleared for take-off, their busy army of worker ant newspaper columnists sweat like galley slaves frothing everything up.

I understand why they do this: they want their team to win, so it's get in there early and impress the waverers, the floaters, with just how businesslike the boys and girls in blue are, tell them about the preparations they've made, how they'll hit the ground running and straight into action.

All understood, I'd do the same, but there be monsters here; the constant repetition, the never ending implication that they'll win (sad, but likely), might actually back fire: there's so much froth to step through - more than you'd find on a cappuccino - that there's all the likelihood that some people will give up trying to understand them, or actually believe they are the government, and not vote. Please let it be the latter.

Of course, there is the minor matter of the Tories winning the next election, but that does n't seem to bother their thinking.

I agree: it is almost Beckettian, if it's late, and you're still in the office, and the only other company is a fly trapped in the fluorescent light fitting. Not me, I'm sat on the sofa, idly surfing, it's someone I've just heard asking for a request on the radio. Late night working....many unhappy memories...