This morning was so cold, I did the washing-up in the kitchen just to warm up my hands. Then I thought I'd better soak in every last bit of sunshine by drawing back all the blinds and turning the sofa towards the window until Rover said, "Stop!"
And there we were, Rover and I, lying on the sofa and lapping up the sunshine on this sunny Sunday morning. While Rover chewed on some dried liver, I did the same with George Negus's book, "The World from Down Under", a collection of 'mind-watering' articles.
With hundreds of articles on over five hundred pages, it's the sort of book "you read when you're not reading a book", which meant that I could also finish off the 150 pages of "What does China think?" by Mark Leonard, which had been on my back-burner for some time.
Written well before the more recent South China Sea disputes, it makes you think just how deeply we should get drawn into this maritime mess, if we don't want to have the Chinese navy flexing its muscles off our own shores in ten years' time.
If we can stay clear of it, it won't be thanks to our politicians' foresight but rather to the fact that our billion-dollar navy assets have become more of a liability, as they're currently tied up in Sydney with propulsion problems. As for those new-beaut submarines we've ordered from the French, I guess they'll end up as problem-plagued as the Collins class.
Who'd want to invade us anyway? We're practically ungovernable.
