Recovery is an eight-letter word (I counted)

We're here for the free lutefisk.

I'm the one on the left, left of the guy on the left who's looking to the left. You know, seeing all these obviously disintegrating peasants lining up to look nervous makes me wonder: do Norwegians carry an anxiety gene, maybe mutated from the pillaging gene, which we all know from books.

So, welcome. This is my Hoxton blog, where we reinstate that happiest of romantic therapies: talking about ourselves until we can't feel our feelings. Personally, I plan to follow Charles Lamb's example by alternating morbid self-pity with cheery (but not giddy) evasion. So, please, enjoy this slide into funhouse feelings and epistemologies, where, I hope, I can embarrass my fears sufficiently to make their menace small; so I will. Perhaps also I can grieve here in public and rid myself of their mental burden. So I will. Complaint for catharsis; burlesque for being here.

You know, being Norse and therefore sad, and vitamin-D deficient, with many a defiled monastery on my ancestral conscience, my task is likely to be long and difficult. Like Henry Lancaster, that other pretender-marauder, I'll practice penance, make a siege, and play tennis. But expect no chantries. This Henry don't pray.