Melbourne Museum (see below)

A belated happy new year to all! I hope you have a most excellent 2008.

I have lots of plans for exciting things this year, many of which I’m sure I’ll share here in due course. But unfortunately I’ve not had the greatest start to the year so far, so I’ll have a little whine here before I get into it!

Shortly before Christmas I fell over and injured both legs quite badly while racing around. Shortly after Christmas I fell over again and re-injured one of them so badly I couldn’t touch it! Don’t worry – I’ve been checked out and all is okay and both falls really were accidents rather than anything more sinister. But the injuries have definitely slowed me down a lot and made me a tad mopey and frustrated.

But also more generally my health really isn’t fantastic just now. This is most likely the result of taking on too much and working truly insane hours for far too long, something my body and my over-taxed brain aren’t coping with too well, even after a bit of a break.

So while I was planning to spend the last few weeks starting all sorts of exciting new projects, I’ve actually achieved very little. Instead I’ve come to the realisation that I desperately need to sort a few things out for myself personally so I can be a bit more functional this year – and work more effectively on the things that are most important to me without killing myself in the process!

At this point I don’t expect any of this will really impact on the core of my business and I’m managing to keep up just fine with orders and the like. However, I have been finding general communication a bit of a challenge, so if I owe you an email or something, I sincerely apologise for being a bit crap and will do my best to get back to you soon. If I happen to owe you a phone call, you probably don’t have much hope – the phone and I aren’t really on speaking terms just now!

Once I do start getting on top of things and start being a bit more functional, I hope to get those exciting projects underway and to be making some interesting changes. But more about that later.

So instead of telling you all about the exciting projects I’ve (not) got happening, I will tell you that I went to Melbourne for the first time in around fifteen years recently, where I had a very interesting look around to refresh my thoughts about the place and also where I spent some time with my friend Meringue.

I’ve put up photographs from this trip on Flickr, if you’re interested.