Peysage polaire

A pair of French €0.56 stamps from 2009. Not a Christmas stamp today, but a cold one nonetheless.

As you may know I write business software for a living, and you may also be aware that the UK left the EU on 31 December 2019, but during 2020 was in a transition phase where EU rules still apply. At the moment we are now only a few days away from 2021 and we don't know what software to provide for our clients, because the government doesn't know what laws will apply, so the software vendor we support doesn't know what to write, and therefore we still have nothing to offer our customers. We also discovered that about half of our clients can't even apply the fixes we know about, without first upgrading their systems to a higher release level, which isn't something they are probably very keen to do this close to Christmas and New Year, given the pain that a support pack upgrade normally entails... We hope that our friends in Walldorf will release a version that we can apply, even to the older systems some of our clients have.

Politics of BREXIT and COVID aside, only an utter imbecile would plan to have something as massive as this happen on 1 January. While I have strong opinions about BREXIT, any sane person can see that something as structurally significant as this should be scheduled to happen when people are available to do the work and then test it, and it also helps to actually tell people what will actually happen a little bit more than a few days before it actually happens. It's not like the people in government haven't known what was going to happen - they did after all promise that everything would be the same only better, and that it would be the easiest trade deal in history, years ago....!