New year; new calendar.  Will it have kittens on?  A favourite football team?  12 pictures of Claudia Cardinale (I’m buying a calendar for a friend)?  One thing is certain, mine won’t have the new moon turning up on the 15th of every month.

We never had a calendar as my Mum rarely attended school and so it never mattered what date it was as she couldn’t count further than 31.  My Nan, however, in her Balham flat, had a very simple one showing the phases of the Moon.  She’d have been an astronaut had she not had a fear of heights – and Martians.

More men would have had Pirelli calendars, only there was a general fear of foreign food in the ‘60s. 

These days most shopping centres have pop-up stalls (seemingly all year round, thus catering for anyone who has just come out of a coma) serving every hobby and interest (unless you’re a budding astronomer).  But you only really need one with several columns making sure no one forgets their gym kit so it’s academic what the pictures are.  I created one one year for my household with a different Nazi each month; we’d got to October (Hermann Göring in a swimsuit) before anyone noticed.

Because I’m still working from home, I’ve erected a bird table outside my study window, a consequence of which is that my calendar for 2021 features Garden Birds.  I’m looking forward to August – the index has promised “Great Tits”.

63 and only now going through adolescence 🙂