We celebrated our forty first wedding anniversary last summer. A good bunch of our cruising friends joined us in an anchorage somewhere in Indonesia to commiserate, sorry, celebrate, and one of the many topics up for discussion that night, other than the availability of beer, was just how on earth did we manage to stay together for that amount of time, especially living in a confined space all day, every day for years on end - including the ten years we worked together, eighteen all told, living in each other’s pockets 24/7.

Well, dear readers, if you’re interested or indeed in need of some expert advice, one of the keys is delegation; a clear separation of responsibilities. At work, I did all the right brain stuff. Anne did all the left. On the boat, coincidentally, I do starboard and Anne does port. That’s right and left for the non yotties and those yotties that have forgotten. Getting to and from the family, Anne does the packing and I fix the travel.

And these days, that’s quite challenging, unlike packing a bag full of stuff we have to pay extra to cart from one side of the globe to the other and back again but never use. Back in the good old days, if you wanted a holiday or to fly somewhere, you’d tell your travel agent what you wanted and bingo, three days later you’d have your itinerary, tickets and a bill for thousands.

Nowadays, now that the Interweb has made things so much easier, you spend these three days fiddling about on a tiny screen, comparing about a hundred alternative routes from A to B and finally, after you’ve registered with enough personal details to allow any half competent hacker to access your life savings, you might just have made a booking.

In doing so, one should always keep in mind current affairs. Unfortunately, that’s a subject I find rather distracts me from my pursuit of pure enjoyment. Anne can’t do without her daily fix of BBC news. Personally, I can do without knowing what stage of the Brexit fiasco we’re at, how the Green Pound is faring (whatever happened to the Green Pound?) or whether Harry and Meghan can oust the Kardashians from their top TV rankings.

Consequently, in my usual state of blissful ignorance of world affairs I timed our mini break in Hong Kong to clash, if that’s not a poor choice of phrasing, with the present unpleasantness over there and to compound the problem, on Sunday we fly back to the boat via the Middle East. Perhaps not the best choice of routes right now.

Anyway, we had a great time seeing old friends, holidaying with the kids and much as we love the grandchildren, although I couldn’t eat a whole one, we are looking forward to resuming our life in our little microcosm, where things do seem a lot less complicated. And somewhat warmer.

I won’t say the weather has been terrible here in Scotland, in fact, it’s not been that bad, all things considered - the deluge in Indonesia, the winds and raging fires of Australia, minus 15c in Canada for example but when I turned on the radio the other day and they played a song by the Scottish band, Wet Wet Wet, I couldn’t help but smile.

Which hopefully this post has made you.

It’s 2020 and we’ll be heading somewhere. Maybe east, maybe west or just fiddling around out here - right now we just don’t know. So many options. Too few brain cells. Follow the Blog to find out and, if you’re so inclined, subscribe to my rubbish videos on YouTube at SV Time Bandit.

Happy new year and thanks for following.