ALTHOUGH I am a member of the New Year: Stay Home tribe, I enter a new year with respect. I choose a rare and irreplaceable bottle of wine, I prepare a perfect fillet of venison and celeriac gratin and lay a table for two in front of the fire. This year—no trains, no nurses, no post, no ambulances and a bad war—I think, but don’t say, that a general anaesthetic might have been a better choice than Paulliac.
And so the year begins. The sheep welcome me as their Angel of the Bales (hay) and Buckets (ewe nuts). The chickens and turkeys
