A Merry Christmas to all

Red roses, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

As a happy and proud atheist, I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

Fred and I made it over to England yesterday, suffering only a two hour delay due to fog the previous day which had left most of the flybe fleet in the wrong place at the start of what is one of the busiest days in the air of the year. We were met by Mum who took us back to Crewkerne in Somerset where we were in time to watch the Grand Final of Strictly Come Dancing.

Fred had been keeping me up-to-date with all the comings and goings on the show while I had bene away and our two favourites Matt and Mark were, rightly enough, in the final. Matt better at ballroom and Mark better at Latin American. It was billed as being the closest final they had had but in all honesty, Mark Ramprakash had a much higher entertainment value with his hip gyrations during two amazing dances he performed out of the five and it was quite right that he was voted winner.

Today, a low-key Christmas Eve, starting off in Woolworths finishing the Christmas shopping, going out for a drink in the pub at lunchtime, with lobster flavoured and lemon and chili flavoured crisps as snacks, each packet costing as much as a plate of something delicious in Hanoi or Battambang. Battambang was in the news, well Hello Magazine, as it is in Battambang Province that Angelina Jolie had had a house built. She had just taken Brad Pitt and their three children there to look at the work being done by her foundation in helping a community up in the north-west. Good for them, helping putting Cambodia on the map and highlighting the continued problems of landmines there.

We are now waiting for my sister Fiona and her son Thomas to turn up and by the smell of it, Mum has another delicious dinner waiting for us.

In the meantime, an e-mail form Richard tells us that he arrived back in Nagaland safe and sound albeit with one or two problems on his flights back.