It’s now three days since 2023 started. Is it going to be any different from 2022? As in all these things we did not expect certain things to happen in the year just past. We did not expect the most pointless of wars to be started in a European country. We did not expect the end of a less glorious Elizabethan age with the death of the only monarch most of us have known. Deaths of people that have meant a lot to so many continued right to the end of that year, Pele and Ratzinger among them.

The new year began for us in climatological gloom. Unlike last year’s start which heralded almost three months of sunlit days with hardly a drop of rain this year we have been smothered in mist and drizzle. Certainly the temperatures have been above the mean for this time of year but oh for a drop of warm Mediterranean sunshine and a bit less mud on our boar-infested forest slopes!

What delights and horrors will 2023 bring us and, in particular, us two? I only hope one thing, that the ghastly invasion of a sovereign nation by a power still enmeshed in vain glories of a tartar-like conquest will cease. Vain hope clearly …or is it?

Almost as vain I presume as the UK seeing sense and approaching closer ties with the EU after it so crazily decided to ditch the union which had helped to save it from economic collapse in the nineteen seventies. Almost fifty years have passed since that promising time. Will we ever get back to becoming a great European nation again instead of being a periferal nuisance I wonder?

In this respect, looking at the assembly halls of European national parliaments with their ample semi -circular banks of seats in which the subtlest of political persuasions are able to find voice through correct proportional representation and then observing the cramped ping-pong style chamber without proper desks or electronic voting systems in which a now highly superannuated ‘mother of parliaments’ is conducting its business in a setting which fails to admit even the faintest attempt at workable coalitions through that feudal fptp voting system I am strongly of the opinion that British parliamentary reform would be greatly accelerated by the closing down of the Palace of Westminster from further political manoeuvres and its conversion into a museum of political evolution and democracy. The MPs could then be moved to a decent purpose-built parliamentary assembly building – rather on the lines of the Scottish parliament – a place where each MP has their own guaranteed place to sit with a desk for their papers and with a continuum between left and right, encouraging collaboration between factions and with the proper representation of smaller parties finally given a place in the national assembly thanks to a long overdue system of proportional representation.

If there was a parliamentary reform act in 1832 followed by two further ones in just one century then why are we still bogged down by latter-day rotten boroughs?

Meanwhile the steamy mists of our valley pour over the brown slopes of the hills. Deep in the undergrowth wildlife is surviving what for them is a pleasingly mild start to January. Perhaps some quadrupeds may be hibernating while others are invading parts of our own land digging up desperately mauled lawns in search of tasty tubers and bulbs.

In the meantime we in our Appennine cot dream eagerly of rays of warm sunshine and the first budding crocuses, those cheerful harbingers of the delights mother nature has in store for us in a world where hope and promise are ever more difficult to discern.