Bugger! Here we all were, gearing up for a vast improvement from the calendar s**t-storm of 2020, only for 2021 to start with quasi-biblical downpours and subsequent course closure on the first Saturday of the year. Clearly the powers-that-be (insert your own preferred deity/non-deity here) have a rather twisted sense of humour. Still, it would be wrong to ignore the passing of what has been a most tumultuous year - one that started, aptly as it turned out, with news of raging wild fires across Australia and portentous coloured skies crossing the Tasman Sea. Hindsight unerringly telling us what a harbringer of troubles it actually heralded. Some (I am looking at the pedants out there), would say that not only was it the end of the year, but also the end of the decade - the argument is based on when you start counting a decade - if you starting counting ten years from 1 Jan 2010, then the decade ends on 31 Dec 2019 - which seems perfectly sensible. If you go back to the start of the Julian Calendar, however, there was no year "0". It starts with year "1", so the first calendar decade ran from 1 Jan 1 to 31 Dec 10. Carry that forward and every decade span actually ends on the 31 Dec year ...0. The only way for option 1 to work is for the first "decade" to only last 9 years - the calendar puritans cannot, understandably, take such an indecent inconsistency lying down and so the argument continues to rage, factions form, bile and bitterness surface as numerical antagonists fight for the right to say that 2020 is the last year of the twenty tens, not the start of the twenty twenties (and vice versa)! Frankly, I am just glad it is over, and if that is all we have to worry about this year, then it's going to be a good one Stay safe and play well Steve |