I’m not saying it’s cold, but …

… it’s cold.

1. The entry begins
Wak­ing up on Sat­urday morn­ing and real­ising this fact (that it was very cold then, just as it’s still very cold now), I imme­di­ately turned on my cent­ral heat­ing — which, thanks to the won­ders of mod­ern tech­no­logy, had auto­mat­ic­ally turned itself off at 8.45am in the belief that I had left for work. I hadn’t, of course. Gone to work, that is. Because it was Sat­urday. Did I men­tion that?

Any­way, that excit­ing event took place some 37 hours ago. The cent­ral heat­ing has remained on since then because, as I believe I’ve already men­tioned, it’s very cold.

2. A brief digres­sion (with pic­ture)
We inter­rupt this scin­til­lat­ing ver­biage to encour­age you, the reader, to look at the pic­ture on the left. It’s just over there. Yes, there. The cloud thing with a sun peek­ing out cheekily from behind it. It’s a BBC Weather sym­bol — as used by BBC weather­men, weather­wo­men and, indeed, weather­per­sons of non-specific gender over the years — and its pur­pose in the grand scheme of things is to indic­ate that there are likely to be sleet showers dur­ing the day. Either that, or it’s going to start rain­ing aster­isks and huge blue tears.

Now, in search­ing for this graphic, I also dis­covered that BBC Weather has a sym­bol indic­at­ing a sand­storm. This got me think­ing that, one day when I’m feel­ing par­tic­u­larly unwell, I’d like to tune into the weather fore­cast after the late even­ing news and find that the jolly fig­ure of Ian McCaskill has come out of retire­ment to excitedly pro­claim that Wol­ver­hamp­ton has been issued with a Severe Weather Warn­ing because of dan­ger­ous sand­storms that are about to sweep through the town centre. In Janu­ary. When it’s cold. Very cold.

Fact check: there’s not usu­ally sand in Wol­ver­hamp­ton, is there?

Please under­stand that I have noth­ing against Wol­ver­hamp­ton; I just picked a ran­dom city from my men­tal map of the UK, and Wol­ver­hamp­ton happened to be it. My sin­cere apo­lo­gies to all Wol­ver­hamp­to­ni­ans. You’re not really get­ting a sand­storm, I prom­ise. I’m just slightly deli­ri­ous, that’s all.

Where was I? Oh yes.

3. The entry resumes (keep up at the back)
The afore­men­tioned cent­ral heat­ing has, I’m very glad to report, now suc­ceeded in thor­oughly warm­ing both me and my flat — to such an extent, in fact, that I prob­ably wouldn’t even notice if the tem­per­at­ure out­side had sud­denly plunged to ten below zero and star­ted freez­ing birds to death as they perched on branches.

The warmth here indoors, how­ever, raises one major prob­lem, a prob­lem that can only really be prop­erly mulled over at about this time on a Sunday night: namely that I have abso­lutely no desire to ven­ture out into the icy frosts tomor­row morn­ing, even if it is for the pur­poses of enthu­si­ast­ic­ally (cough) begin­ning a new week at work and earn­ing enough money to pay for my lovely cent­ral heating.

Because it’s cold.

Did I men­tion that it’s cold? Very cold.

Oh, I did.

4. A ridicu­lous notion inter­venes
It’s cer­tainly too cold to con­sider writ­ing inter­est­ing entries here. As I’m sure you’ll have noticed over the course of the pre­ced­ing para­graphs. Lots of short sen­tences and inter­est­ing punc­tu­ation in lieu of actu­ally hav­ing any­thing remotely enga­ging to say. I’m almost temp­ted to risk enter­tain­ing my reader(s) with a week of incred­ibly bor­ing posts, purely in the pur­suit of a styl­istic device. Do you think any­one would notice? Or notice any dif­fer­ence? Or care?

Cut­ting edge blog­ging con­tent con­tin­ues. Pay atten­tion, damn it.

5. The entry con­cludes
It’s cold. Or I’m ill. Whichever.

I’d like it to be Spring now. Please.