Not exactly a good start to the New Year - was on a bit of an excursion with my dear wife primarily to Windsor Castle, which was splendid in the extreme then out of curiosity just to see if the place was as horrible as its reputation, we called at nearby Slough, at a fittingly-horrible large supermarket built on stilts as modern urban ones are in order to allow cars to park beneath. Ascent to the store was via a big escalator. I have no sense of balance at all now, since one inner ear was removed so that surgeons could get to my brain stem and skull base innards and I can't have been as compensatory and careful because I lost my balance and fell over backwards down the moving escalator, which did nothing for my dignity and composure nor my wife's who was behind me and took the impact. Fortunately just bruised by it all, so could have been much worse, but the words of the former Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman ring still true: ' Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It's not fit for humans now........'