Sofa surfing

I literally spent the day today doing an application for the Arts Council. Literally. The whole day. I worked from the sofa. I had some soup... On the sofa... I had tea... On the sofa. My only adventure was a trip to the corner shop, where they'd run out of Balsamic vinegar. Boo! The guys next door were smoking dope in the back garden. I walked through a great cloud of the stuff as I walked down our steps. They didn't seem at all embarrassed, or make any attempt to hide their joints. It's a good job I'm not a policeman! 

I switched the news on at one point and wished I hadn't bothered. Even John Snow acknowledged that everything he'd read out had had distinctly gloomy overtones. From the dreadful attack in a Berlin Christmas market to the murder of the Russian ambassador in Turkey. The only bright side seemed to be that people were escaping Aleppo, but I'm not sure that they're escaping to anywhere a great deal better. The world seems throughly unstable at the moment. I keep having to rid myself of the thought that the First World War was started by an assassination - and I'm afraid I find myself thinking of this particular event as a political assassination rather than an act of terrorism. Feel free to disagree...