Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! Thanks for reading and listening and using this Speakola thing. If spoon on champagne glass tings later tonight, I hope the site has helped!

This illustration is from my regular kids book illustrator, Laura Wood.

Thanks so much for wonderful year everyone! I planned for a lengthy post about the speeches that made 2022, but parenting and an extended swim got in the way. Yes, northern hemisphere, we swim at Christmas!

I post a regular favourite New Year speech annually. For me it’s a euphoric speech from a euphoric time, by one of the great people to have strode the earth.

Happy New Year, everyone!

1 January 1990, Prague, Czech Republic (then Czechoslavakia)

My dear fellow citizens,
For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. A country that once could be proud of the educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world. We have polluted the soil, rivers and forests bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adults in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.