If you’ve made it this far then you are all doing very well and I’m impressed. I’m also grateful that you’ve kept on reading. It’s something to help your turkey slide down the digestive tract.

As for me, last night I almost fell asleep in the middle of watching a film. So I crawled myself off to bed. And aftr an hour or so I awoke and started to have another one of these nuit blanches. Strangely enough I didn’t feel at al bad about it – and that’s a change.

Somewhere during the night I did drop off, and went off on one of my rambles. And we had a couple of strange people either making their acting debuts or first appearances for a considerable length of time.

I was back running my taxis again. And on Saturday mornings when I was having a lie-in the telephone was manned by Wendy (wherever did she spring from?) and Simon came in for a couple of hours to deal with breakdowns and do a little mechanical work. I’d been assembling a kind of breakdown kit and even cobbled together an old Jeep Patriot kitted out with emergency stuff for him. BUt when I came downstairs he hadn’t come in to work. So I rang him to ask where he was, and he gave me a list of things that he’d been doing instead. Clearly he had no intention of coming in to work again. So I explained that he was free to go if he liked, but I would have appreciated a little notice so that I could have made other arrangement.
I was also in Canada during the night. I’d booked a room in a motel and they knew that I didn’t intend to arive until the small hours. And so I turned up at about 03:00, was given the key to the room looking forward to crashing out in it straight away – and it was filthy; Hadn’t been cleaned for a month and someone had even tried to light a fire in it, leaving cinders and charred wood all over the place. Even worse than that Motel 6 in North Virginia.

Although I woke up on several occasions during the night, it was at about 09:30 when I arose from my bed. And after my medication I sent out a whole stream of cheery greetings to people on the internet.

One or two of the sites on my social networking were running a couple of quizzes so I passed a very entertaining morning, punctuated only by a pause for breakfast.

The paté that I had bought for Christmas lunch – it wasn’t mushroom paté at all. I’d made a mistake. I remembered that they had none, so I had bought garlic and fine herb paté instead. Nevertheless, it was equally delicious on hot buttered toast, and I ate rather a large amount of it.

I’m glad that I had bought that toaster when I first moved in here.

Apart from that, I’ve nibbled some biscuits, some clementines, some swets and a bar of chocolate-covered marzipan.

Pride of place goes, though, without saying, to the Christmas cake.

I don’t have many friends, but those that I have are the best in the wld – quality before quantity of course – and Liz has done me proud once again this year.

Her Christmas cake is absolutely delicious. Each year it gets better and better. So good health to you, Liz.

I’ve braved the hurricanes and been out for my two walks this afternoon – and merited my two mugs of home-made hot chocolate. More than you will ever know in fact because at one point in the proceedings I was actually running down the street chasing after my hat that had Gone With The Wind. That was totally unexpected – I haven’t really run for anything for over two years and didn’t know that I still could.

Mind you, the way that I’m out of breath, I’m not sure that I can.

Final word tonight must go on the perfidy of the internet.

You’ll remember that my web browser did a real mega-upgrade at the start of the month and dumped a pile of developers and their add-ons, including my much-loved *.ftp add-on.

And how I was left high and dry without a *.ftp program for a whole three and a half weeks.

And how I spent all afternoon in a relentless (and untimately successful) attempt to program my web server?

So today, a group of developers has launched an ultra-slimmed-down web browser using the Open Source code of the browser that dropped them, and many of the dropped code modules seamed straight in. I gave it a try and my *.ftp module was picked up immediately.

It’s called Waterfox and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s the fastest browser that I’ve ever seen. No bells, no whistles, just what I want.

There will probably be a few problems to overcome but as long as it handles my file uploads seamlessly like it seems to be doing, it will be fine by me.