Belated happy new year! I must admit that I haven't had internet withdrawal symptoms at all during my twelve days in Northern Ireland, but I'm getting back to normal again. First priority is to get the A-Z and indexes up to date to include the new December content, second priority is to get cracking with the print edition.

A few new things will be added over the next few days - reviews of Belle and Sebastian and the Feline Dream, a generalised albums of the year feature and a composite list of your albums of the year. Ten people have sent in their lists and I've compiled a master list out of those - the winner isn't a surprise, but at least it isn't the White Stripes or the Strokes like every other list around! It might even be finished later on today.

Anyway, I had a fine time in Northern Ireland. I went to see Belle and Sebastian who still play too quietly for my liking. They were in their silly cover version mode, which kind of comes with the season I suppose. 'The Boys are back in town' was an unlikely choice though! I also saw the Feline Dream at last, who were loads better than I expected, really entertaining. Met a few people from the world of the internet at that show, including Nine who I hadn't seen in about five years! She has a new weblog Jinx Removing which I've just spent the afternoon reading.
Didn't do too much after Christmas except generally over indulge myself. We'd hired a car but then Gillian developed a chest infection, and as she didn't feel like drinking, she ended up driving me around everywhere. Naturally this meant we could visit loads more people, and we actually went to four different places on New Year's Eve, which was a good idea at the time, except I had to fly back to London at noon on New Year's Day and go straight to work - I was a bit groggy to say the least. After all these festivities I have seriously considered not drinking during January, but today one of my friends is leaving work so I guess I may be tempted. Naturally I would have hoped to hold out longer than the 2nd of January but these things happen!

in 2001 I
- completely failed to relocate from London to Belfast
- set up slowthrills.com as a domain name, as a precursor for the print edition which will appear early this year.
- didn't travel as much as I wanted, but still got to go to Tunisia in January, Sudan in May and Dublin in October.

in 2002 I
- will publish issue one of Slow Thrills (at least!)
- will write more
- will travel more
- will keep any New Year's Resolutions deliberately vague.