‘AH, WELL,” said my good friend the Philosopher, while running his long-fingered and powerfully veined hands along the brass studs on the arms of the softly curved, green leather chair, which had been waiting for him among the ghosts at our table in the old bandstand of the marble café, hidden off the windiest street in the world.

“Ah, well,” he said again, this time more strongly, clearing the phlegm that had gathered in his chest down those many days as a young man, when he walked the fog-veiled waterfront by the ancient Priory and fortified his soul with the spirits from a little flask – so that he could imagine holy men in black cowls, sitting on the rough benches in the chapter-house, turning the pages of their Bibles with coarse thumbs that had also rubbed the foreheads of pale children, awaiting the smile of their Maker.

In his grey, brown and black imagination, the Philosopher saw the pinched meanness in the face of the angular Prior, who watched them silently by the arched window, cursing his own lack of drive.

For, in his calculating heart, the Prior knew that it was ambition, not prayers, which brought advancement in his church.

Outside, the ceaselessly brooding water rinsed the reedy shore and the hunched birds bickered like hags on the naked trees behind the scriptorium, where the sacred texts are kept away from prying eyes.

“Fog is the theatre of stories,” the Philosopher whispered to himself on those lonely walks.

But today he was shuddering at the memory in his stately chair.

“The old year is failing,” he continued. “It is a slippered year now, nodding in half-sleep by the warm fire of its long evenings, a bit like me.

But it could still have some tricks to reveal.

Never say goodbye to a year until it is vanished into history and has become just a row of numbers clamped in a book.

“Yet, is it not agreeable to be eating a good English breakfast, after all those rich meals of the festive season?