List, oh list!

It’s summer here, and for readers in less favoured hemispheres I should explain that in Australia nothing of any consequence is permitted between the last office party in December and the beginning of the school term in late January. The Prime Minister goes to the cricket, and then to the Australian Open. By law, all tradespeople go fishing, usually well into February. So for us suburbanites the Christmas holidays turn into the DIY season.

Here at Wordability HQ we have been building what I insist is called a chookhouse, not a hen-house and still less a chicken house. The word is chook, as in raffle. I may post a pic when it is complete. It is perhaps the only chookhouse in the world with window boxes.

This I tell you to account for the recent blanks. We horny-handed sons of toil are dulled by husbandry. But while digging and delving and prising staples out of the dog, I did reflect on the good things I happen to have encountered in 2008 and the result is a list, yes, another list, the sort that make you tired.

Invited to tell us his highlights for 2008, the Chairman of International Cartels, responsible for half the world’s finance, says he re-read Proust in October, this time in Dutch. He’s lying, the hound, but nobody’s asking you for your list, are they? Worse, not only have you not heard of most of the books on the lists, you haven’t even heard of the celebrities who compile them. These are signs of age.

The Wordability list has several merits. It is short. It contains only one thing that actually appeared in 2008, which should cheer up those of you who, like me, are hopelessly behind and getting behinder. It will appear in easy instalments, of which this is the first and shortest.

The Wordability highlights of 2008, Number 1.

Best line of dialogue: Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.

I can see Russia from my house.