As I write this it is 23 December 2022; coming up to 6 years after this shot was taken. The title of this gallery, however, is "For A Few PESOs More; Occasional Shots 2017 to ..." well, 2022 at the moment of typing, but that will change. In fact, it will change very shortly.

However the first shot that was posted into this gallery was for 4 January 2020, which the temporally literate will be aware is 3 years after the gallery's supposed start. I was doing a (supposedly) PAD (Photo A Day) gallery between 2010 and 2015, though in reality I never got a full year's worth of photos. By the start of 2016, I knew that I was kidding myself and moved to a PESO (Photo Every So Often) gallery for 2016. By 2017 I realised that I wasn't even generating enough content for a year by year PESO gallery, so I switched to a multi-year one and while I intended to return to something more frequent eventually, life had other ideas. And still does.

However the time has come to fill in the gap between 1 January 2017 and now, whenever "now" is when you read this. Let us begin with a photo that I did actually take on the first day of the year probably with the intention of taking them more regularly in 2017. Hah! Like that worked out.

In 2016, 4 of us made a journey to Italy. As a result of that trip, and the expectation that there would be further trips (an expectation which was only partially realised), I was showered with presents relating to the trip. A book on the design of the Colosseum, complete with a fold out diagram! A Roman card game! A book on "Releasing Your Inner Roman", which is probably unnecessary when you have plenty on the outside already. And an Italian language calendar, although I may have bought that myself in the expectation that it would be like a crossword dictionary calendar full of esoteric words and etymologies. As it turned out, the word for 1 January was "Benvenuto", and no, it didn't get much further beyond phrasebook Italian as the year went on.

It would be 2 and three-quarter years before any of us would set foot in Italia again, and it has now been over 3 years since we last did. However I like the optimism of the presents. Happy New Year, 2017, despite the fact that in real life that year is now like an old, old newspaper that is yellowing and crinkling up at the edges in the memory.

Of course one thing about 2017? The whole world was blissfully ignorant of the word "Covid" at the time, and would remain unaware of it for another 3 years or so.