Braving the chill moat

To this day, dear reader, we've found it difficult to master a dip beyond the tanline in the wintry moat of morn, begging your indul-gence of a shivering waste of tanline, to be sure. To our patient friends in Capetown and Singapore, we especially apologise for this seasonal stigma of the globe's ambivalent hemispheres. Still, to set the stage for one of our rare and most reluctant forms of posting, we think it best to portray at least this exertion of our bona fides as we cast the gaze of the dutiful subject, upon his condition in these exotically inscrutable Indies known as Virginia. To those who would just as soon exempt themselves from this, most rusticating digression, we propose a comfy parallelogram of vacant pause.