HAVING a February birthday has always given me a slightly rose tinted view of what is thankfully the shortest month.

February is however a month of little merit and, even by its own low expectations, its final week is proving to be a pretty dismal one. Indeed biblical parallels abound, with floods and disease dominating the news and affecting the lives of many.

I am fortunate enough to live on relatively high ground but am amazed that property descriptions, both here and in the UK, seem to focus on the energy rating of a potential home rather than its height above sea level.

Bad planning looks set to be caught out by the rising sea levels of global warming, and this must become an increasingly relevant factor in terms of where to make long term capital investment in any sector.

With regard to coronavirus, I do wish that commentators would stop telling us that the death toll is rising because, by its very definition, it can hardly fall.

The outbreak does bring into focus the stricter controls that exist for the movement of animals than for the movement of humans.

You cannot, for example, bring a horse into the ring at Goffs unless it is accompanied by a health certificate and a passport, from which its identity and vaccinations will be checked, yet a wheezing, sniffling human, equipped with a compliant passport, has been able to hop around the world at ease.

ID cards, with associated medical data, may be a long term solution but this always stirs people up, who bang on about their right to privacy.

With the onset of portable technology, most of us have unwittingly already given away our privacy anyway, and anything that increases the welfare of the majority must justify the loss of privacy rights for the individual.

It has also been a challenging week for me on the domestic front as Alice has been away, on a cultural tour of St Petersburg. She has left Lara, our eight-year-old daughter, and me trying to manage her five Labrador puppies.

Little did I realise quite what it entailed, especially with their being weaned on the eve of Alice’s departure.

My goodness, the digestive system of these animals is quite remarkable – it moves quicker than Boris Johnson’s proposed super-fast HS2 railway – no sooner is the food in one end than out it comes from the other.

In the puppies’ enclosure, we have got through more newspaper that can be good for the planet and if ever I doubted the long term need for print media, I have changed my tune.

There will never be an iPad produced, or any other device, that could have the absorbent benefits of an old-fashioned broadsheet or tabloid newspaper.

Alice will hope that running around after them will have made their mark on my physique. I recently remarked to a city friend that Ballinlough is not an area serviced by takeaway deliveries, to which he replied that you would not know it to look at me.

Then, for my recent birthday, Alice gave me a Fitbit watch which I am now supposed to use to check how well I have slept, if I have walked far enough, or if my heart is still beating, all of which I can work out for myself. I am also supposed to link it to my phone so that I have a permanent record of all this. Why?

Those with significant health problems might understandably wish to monitor themselves on a regular basis but otherwise the target market for these devices can only be Olympians or bores.

I know that I do not belong to the first group, and can only hope to not belong to the second, although banging on about the findings of my Fitbit will quickly make me one.

I only hope that Alice’s has visited enough churches this week to encourage some Christian kindness when she sees the lack of progress that I have so far achieved.