I have been away from here for a while, mustering my thoughts and surviving Christmas.

Basically, I now have to work for my living. Various happy schemes and arrangments that I enjoyed when first I left Poland at the end of 2007 have fizzled out, so I find myself in the deep English countryside, muddy fields and muddier dogs in all directions, pursuing different projects. This takes time and energy. Life is all about marketing – you can have the best products in the world, but if people aren’t alerted to them and then persuaded to buy them, you get nowhere all too fast.

Thus, in the past few days I and others from ADRg Ambassadors LLP have completed a draft booklet on Negotiation Skills for an international organisation – 13,000 elegant words of real examples from diplomacy linked to specific negotiating techniques – taking general lessons from particular episodes in an accessible and memorable way.

I have completed a bid for training/skills work to the FCO. A ghastly task, as the bureaucracy of bidding for such public sector work has turned what ought to be a simple process into a sprawling labyrinth of jargon and boxes. It’s almost as if the work goes to people who are adept at filling in the forms, rather than those who are good at the actual work haha. Still, the bid is good and the product is even better. So maybe there is Hope.

And I have been working to help a top businessman prepare a major investment presentation – identifying how best to frame the issues and then put them to colleagues in a convincing efficient way.

Before Christmas I was off to a school to give a presentation to teachers on Difficult Conversations: how to manage a discussion when you are being put under pressure by weight of responsibility or someone coming on to you aggressively.

Coming up later this month I have to give a talk at my old Oxford college and then a large set-piece speech on UK/EU at the perfectly apostrophied The (sic) Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

All of which much reduces my zeal for sharing my opinions or even having any. The scary determination of the United States under current management to spend beyond any conceivable means is matched by the brutalist writhings of the decaying welfare state model in Europe: where in all this and the fast-mounting pile of dry Christmas tree needles is anything cheerful and optimistic?

Still, Crawf Major and I did go to watch Tottenham crush Reading on New Year’s Day, so there was some joy over the holiday.

It comes down to this. I am now mainly in the skills/training business, so that’s where my time is focused. If anyone out there wants some of my excellent offerings in 2013, just get in touch. I may reconfigure my website this year to make that a lot more explicit.

Happy New Year and warm regards to all readers, if any of you are by any chance still there.