Well, it’s 2024. I’ll have a look back at 2023 on the blog soon. I don’t have a look ahead to the whole year today, only to the first month. We are off to Bombay in a few hours and will be there through the first week of February before then heading to Seoul for another extended period. I’ll have some adjustments to announce when I get back (which will be right after the blog’s 11th anniversary) but for now it’s going to be business as usual on the blog. As I said in December’s iteration of this post, I had been assiduously at work in the last couple of months of 2023 on banking enough booze reviews to take me through the entire period of my absence from my shelves. So you can continue to expect three booze reviews a month and at least one food report. The major departure is that in January almost all those food reports will be Bombay-centered.

I say “almost all” because I may put up a couple of digests of the meals I ate in Belfast in August, and I do still have one Twin Cities Indian grocery report from the summer that I’ve not gotten around to posting yet. But, against all odds, I’ve cleared out the rest of my backlog. Italy is done, Ireland is done, the reports from my trip to New York are done. I can only hope you like Indian food because you’re going to be reading about it a lot for the next month and a half, and most of it is not going to be the kind of food most of you in the US and Europe are most familiar with. And if you want to keep up with images and videos from markets and the like, you should keep up with my Instagram.

Okay, so what can you expect on the booze front? The following are the banked themed weeks that remain:

• A week of Ben Nevis.
• A week of Caol Ila.
• A week of Highland Park.
• A few weeks of assorted peated whiskies.
• A week of rums from Foursquare.
• Three weeks of mezcal.
• Another week of Compass Box.
• A week of assorted highland distilleries.
• A week of Speyside distilleries.

It’s possible as well that I might review some Indian booze in Bombay, as I plan to buy some to drink while there. As always, if any of these interest you more than others, please feel free to nominate them to the shortlist in the comments below.

In closing, I share with you all the hope that 2024 may be a better year for humanity than 2023 was, especially for the people of Gaza who continue to suffer the assault of the Israeli state; for people in conflict zones elsewhere in the world; for refugees, for migrants, for dispossessed people; and for all marginalized people who suffer at the hands of regimes of arbitrary, unchecked power.