The New Year Muffin

Last night, as I was sitting down with a couple of friends in Taipan, it suddenly struck me how the new year is very much like a muffin.

(Before everyone screams how I've all of a sudden turned potty, please bear with me. When you're done reading, you may contact the authorities.)

When you first get a warm muffin, you will at first be tantalised by the way it looks, and the smell. Any muffin (except for some very badly baked ones) will look extremely inviting at first. And then, you gingerly approach it with your fork, taking into account that by rushing into it you'll probably ruin the whole experience hence a slow, methodical approach is required, as illustrated by Figure 1 below.


Fig 1: the beginning of the year/muffin

Now where were we? Ah yes, the muffin, and how it is like the new year. As you dig your way through, it is almost inevitable that some parts of the thing will fall off and break into heretofore unpredictable patterns and pretty soon your initially orderly eating plans will be in disarray and you're forced to blunder your way through.

Naturally, ordered or not, the muffin will end up eaten, as illustrated by Figure 2.


Fig 2: the end of the muffin

It will be very obvious to the reader now how similarly structured our forays into every fresh new year is to eating a muffin (and if it's not, I don't dare assume anything on behalf of the reader's mental ability since muffins ARE tricky creatures) so in essence - it's pretty much as good an analogy as you're apt to find these days.

So anyway, before I further consign myself to the annals of madmen, I hope that some of you have recovered enough from your hangovers and assorted new year's entertainments to take some time to say hello to 2005, and to maybe not rush into it, but enjoy it - and prepare for the crumbly bits.

After all, what's a muffin without crumbly bits?