that Diamond Year – and I still cannot bring myself to use the actual numbers. It’s not vanity or fear of getting older. More an understandable concern whether I still have mountains to climb or it’s all downhill from Thursday on. It’s got nothing to do with being positive or not and more to do with facing life’s realities.

In my personal year, it’s a time of completion – a 9 nine year – though 2012 is a 5 year generally. Not a time to start anything new, the pundits advise. Just as well then that I have been focusing on what I started before, even with PoD partnerships. I signed up to a few but am gradually working my way round to doing something active about them all.

Profit From Unlimited Thinking is finally a Kindle title.

They get 230 pages of reference and guidance so I’m not going to beat myself up about the odd blips caused by the automatic formatting process, as the price has been substantially dropped to reflect that. I bought a copy to check and it’s still readable.

And the Little Books will be joining them soon – though these will need more of a close look as Kindle seems to have idiosyncratic formatting.

There are no page numbers as it’s just one long document to Kindle, and my footnotes are now in red font. And appear in the body text. The separator quote ‘border boxes’ have totally gone but at least they are in the right places as are Tasks.

On the plus side, the automatic formatting put hyperlinks into the table of contents so it’s now easy and quick to get to one of the five parts. And I didn’t have to do that myself. Phew! All in all, I like it.

I also need to create a brand cover for all the Little Books series, just as Wise El books will all feature her, cartoon-stylee, on the cover. However, like Profit From Unlimited Thinking, the Little Books will be colourful, with the title theme reflecting the current print version colours.

A task for later this or next week as I must pick up with Wise El’s Big Thoughts again. All the words have been written and allocated and outline drawings made. The huge task is to create 150+ finished cartoons which I will then sell individually as well as in book form (print and electronic).

On the fine art front, I have nine works in progress in addition to a Diamond Year personality profile (meaning same PP-stylee with inks and line drawing). I also tore up and threw away several that served no further purpose apart from being a good learning curve.

However, I am now building up a range of original art greetings cards though I have yet to work out where to sell them. Oh for my dream home!

So getting older hasn’t stopped my ambitions, not one iota. Not that I can afford to sit back and wait for the Angel of the Afterlife to claim me. Everything is going up so I need to increase the amount coming in – and fast.

Meanwhile, those skin reactions still seem to come back as an unforgiving allergic reaction to things like coffee and carbs, or something sweet, especially if it’s sunny. Unfortunately, it makes eating rather dispiriting these days, not least because I now know there are super-vigilant, opportunistic, voracious bacteria which would rather kill the host for a quick fix than work for the good of the whole.

And that sounds much like the macrocosm that is England/ Britain/ the EU/ the World. The opportunistic, voracious HUMANS who look for even the smallest kindness so they can take advantage.

Another thing I have not yet lost: my passion against injustice, unfairness, greed and pulling fast ones.

I did want to write about the various links between tolerance for injustice and the slackening of morals to almost Sodom and Gomorrah levels. Christopher Goodwin’s article on Berlin sex clubs; Anglican bishops thinking it’s perfectly ‘just’ to pay people to sit on their backsides and get more income than those who actual do the paying (vent/spleen etc); normalisation of drug use with all the effects on the rest of us; harrassment of Christians for their beliefs about homosexuality (but not Moslems); the PR-inspired sanctification of Mrs Parker Bowles (just wait for the deluge about how wonderful she is when Kate Middleton eventually gets on and has an heir and spare) – and so on and so forth.

Delightful world, isn’t it?

Onwards and upwards!

PS The photos were take pre-birthday with and without makeup as an observer of any personal changes during this Diamond Dragon Year.