Snug. Noun (Brit.). A small, cosy public room in a pub or small hotel. Oxford English Dictionary.

This is the first day in the life of the Snug, as I'm calling my blog, with its deliberate overtones of a pub. I spent many of my happiest moments in pubs in Ireland, Scotland, and England, and in the old days the snug was where you took the family, or your girlfriend, and huddled or cuddled next to the coal fire glowing in the grate, on an ideal blustery night, say in mid-October, and lowered the beer to the point of pleasant befuddlement but not, one hoped, to the point of fisticuffs,or nausea. I've tried to maintain that principle ever since, usually with success.
 
The snug was a place for games of chess and chance (later superseded by the soon-ubiquitous fruit, or slot, machines) and for ardent dicussions of art and politics, the latter always seeming so much more important than the former, and now their ratio of relative significance is precisely the reverse. That explains something about this website of mine; if it's not all about art (or Art), then what's it about? Me, of course, but my art, too, so there you are. Ars longa, etc. We're off to a good start. Cheers until tomorrow.