Shiny!

Yes, this year I am holding Christmas in a gay roller disco.

Note the unpleasant minty-green wall which is standing in for 'tree under which to put this sort of thing'. Note also the complete absence of labels indicating which present is which. Have I cleverly colour-coded the sparkly ribbon so I can tell who gets what? Have I bollards. This could get...interesting.

Off to battle my way onto a train. May your turkeys all be golden, and my apologies if you are one of the long list of people whose Christmas cards are sitting on top of the fridge. I do love you, just apparently not enough to have ever worked out where you live.

Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, which is reminding me it's been a while since I've read anything genuinely 'literary'. You are the reader, reading Italo Calvino's book, which turns out to be the opening chapters of someone else's book, misprinted, which you then seek to read more of, only to discover that it too has been misrepresented, in the course of which you read another misidentified opening chapter of yet another novel, and so on, all while you slowly find yourself becoming not reader but character, narrative, plot. Extraordinarily clever, although I'm wondering if it can sustain itself for another 150 pages. That's the trouble with post-modernism: sometimes the idea is more fun than the execution.

Signatures on contracts and resignation letters. (They say you shouldn't give up your day job just because you have a book deal. 'They' don't also work nights. :P) And notes, notes, notes.

Feeling poorly because now I am on holiday and that's just bloody inevitable; ripping bits of Supernatural onto ye iPod for travel distraction purposes (tiny Dean!); wishing the Spice Girls would stop trying to act and/or sell me things; watching The Children of Green Knowe and feeling impossibly nostalgic.