Strange days indeed at the beginning of the New Year. With many colleagues still on holiday and your favourite TV shows on their summer break, it almost feels as if time has frozen. The impression is reinforced when colleagues return from multi-week trips to Africa or America and ask what happened at home while they were away. The honest answer has to be ‘Nothing much.’

It’s not only road cops and highway sign-writers who have been busy over Christmas. Despite the lure of the banana lounge and the soporific sounds of the Channel Nine commentary team, it’s been hard yakka for our tireless (selfless?) local lawmakers this summer.

US authorities have introduced a range of tighter security measures in response to the ‘underpants bomb’ attack thwarted on Christmas Day aboard a plane arriving at Detroit.