Ho, ho, #@&%ing ho.

Much as we love to get greetings and news from friends and relatives at this time of year, it vexes us that the stamps for our cards cost us a week's state pension.  £0.54 (10/10d) for a stamp that once cost tuppence.  Elegant symmetry, eh?  I'm 65, and the stamp now costs 65 times what it did the first time I posted a Christmas card.  Not that we can't afford it, nor that we grudge sending greetings: rather it's the fact that this simple annual remembering of friends is outside the reach of a lot of our neighbours.  And we, as usual, have cheated by doing our own cards rather than pay for cards from which the charities benefit so little.  (Anyway, they'll get their tuppence-three-farthings when we pawn our wooden footwear.)

Perhaps my view is jaundiced by the fact that my postman's walk round the neighbours and down to the pillar box just now was not fun.  Six weeks into a physiotherapy régime has made little if any difference to my mobility most days: but I did manage the quarter-mile circuit.  How much better off I am than so many.  I can see, hear, drive, and enjoy the convivial company of friends, and I haven't been diagnosed with anything life-limiting.  Gosh: dark days; dark thoughts.  I suggest you stop reading the blog till about April!

Enjoyable lunch gathering here yesterday with Claire and Richard, who, so far as we know, have survived an ill-planned menu; soup with small pasta in it and a main course of canelloni.  Redeeming feature was M. le Chef Pâtissier's strawberry shortcake.  It was delightful to catch up with them again: last time we met (apart from the brief encounter in Fortnums' last week that prompted a call to fix a date) was the July barbecue bash, when we couldn't spend enough time with anyone.

Art class is over until mid-January, and last Thursday, Miss asked me to do my occasional demo of how to set up a greetings card in MS Word.  All good fun, though some fellow students did understandably drop off...   I was a little taken aback to be asked, as the 'senior' member of  the group, to do the presentation of Miss's Christmas gift!  I think, in fact, I'm the youngest, so the message probably is that I'm the one most used to pronouncing sentence!