From my lack of Internet presence over the festive period, you may possibly have been clever enough to deduce that I’ve had a busy and exceedingly merry Christmas, and in deducing such a deduction you would be quite correct.

Approximately ten million relatives were visited - three or four years ago I was running a bit low on relatives, but my sister’s been doing a good job of making up for the shortfall, and Jess has about ten thousand parents, grandparents and aunties, which have all been thrown into the mix. Which was all very jolly, and had the happy side effect that we got lots and lots of presents!

I shan’t bore you with a complete list, but some of the highlights include Jess getting me an Amiga, with which I can happily relive my wasted youth, and Jess’s mum getting Jess a Wii, with which she can happily waste her youth for the first time round. They make an interesting contrast - it’s hard not to be staggered by how far technology has come in fifteen years, but some of the Amiga games are still surprisingly playable too. Though I have to admit that even my beloved Rainbow Islands has nothing on Super Monkey Ball.

And today is Jess’s birthday, so she’s got even more presents, including the chair I’m sitting on now as I blog on her knackered old PC, and the laptop she’s blogging on behind me as she lies on her bed. And I got her a telescope, but it’s a bit too overcast to do much with it at the minute.

So that’s everything that’s been happening on the present front that seems exciting enough to tell you lot about. In a minute we’re going back to the farm to play on Jess’s Wii, so I won’t say a lot else, except a) that I suppose it’s time I gave a definitive time and place for the meet, and since no one’s raised any strong objections to those proposed previously, I will state here and now that it will definitively happen on Saturday 27th of January at The Pelican in Addlestone, Surrey (or here to be exact); and b) for the benefit of all you cat people who might have been concerned, I should mention that a post-Christmas visit to Leicesesecestershire has confirmed that Muffin is alive and well, and as happy and fluffy and purry as ever.

Oh, and c) happy new year! Now I’ll go and see how Jess is getting on with her blog. I bet I won.

Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve! I’m so excited!

Last night Jess and I were looking at the presents we’ve got for one another that are currently piled under the tree at the farm (the tree’s only about a foot high, which is considerably less high than the pile of presents, so we had to stand it on a table), and discovered that the farm’s resident mouse Rodney has been nibbling one of her presents to me. Luckily he hadn’t worked his way through all of the packaging yet. I think she’s got me some chocolates. Rodney likes chocolates.

So do I, which is fortunate.

And today I phoned my dad and he informed me that Muffin, my most favouritest cat in the world, has been rather poorly - frothing at the mouth and suchlike - and my mum was in conference with the vet as we spoke. This was most worrying - I would hate for anything to happen to her, and I couldn’t help feeling a secondary - albeit much lesser - concern that if anything did happen to her, it would have made a right mess of our Christmas plans.

Then this evening I discovered a voicemail message from my mum asking me to phone her. “I’ve got something to tell you", she said ominously. I feared the worst.

It turned out that the thing she’d got to tell me was that she’s been told to give me the message that the farm is now available to us all the way to the new year, which is excellent news because we thought it wasn’t going to be, and it would have been a bit rubbish if Jess had had to spend New Year’s Eve in Leicesecesesester a million miles away from her family, on account of it being her eighteenth birthday. So that was good. And it turned out that Muffin is now on antibiotics, purring happily, and in excellent health. So hurrah! We’re going to have a super happy Christmas after all.

And I don’t expect I’ll blog again beforehand, so I shall take this opportunity to wish you a super happy Christmas too.

I’ve been sent to Jess’s room while she wraps up my Christmas present. I didn’t think it would take long, but she’s been forty minutes so far, so either it’s absolutely HUUUGE or it’s a mincing machine and she’s fallen into it. I don’t know why she’d think I want a mincing machine for Christmas, so my money’s on the HUUUGE option. I’m so excited!

And that’s all I wanted to say, really. I’d better not get engrossed in writing a long blog - she’ll be back before too long, surely?

Oh, and I haven’t heard about anyone else’s availability since my last post, so we’ll pencil in the meet for January 27th, shall we?

So I came up to Lancashire for the weekend and decided it wasn’t worth going back to Leicesecesesecestershire before Christmas. So here I still am. That probably means you won’t be hearing much from me until the new year, but no doubt I’ll drop by now and again.

First things first, I see that my advent calendar has very nearly run out of pictures, so if you don’t want my website to explode I suggest you contribute to it NOW.

Second things second, the dates on which you lovely people are free for the Christmas meet are coming in thick and fast (if you haven’t filled in my form yet, you can do that now too). It’s probably too early to set a firm date, but for the convenience of those of you with busy schedules who want to know when you can safely make other arrangements, the dates that the most people can make so far are the 2oth and 27th of January in joint first place, followed by the 13th, followed by the 6th, 21st and 28th, so it will almost certainly be one of those. If I had to put money on it I’d guess the final date will be Saturday the 27th, based purely on the fact that it was Saturday 28th last year.

Anyway, that’s all fairly dull, so I suppose I’d better tell you something more exciting. You recall, no doubt, that I was meaning to go to Tesco to get some Christmas cards printed. I went, but their printing machine was “temporarily out of service". It was temporarily out of service when I tried to use it about eight months ago. I thought they’d have fixed it by now, but apparently not.

So yesterday I went to Asda to get them to print there instead. I told the machine I wanted cards printing and handed in the receipt. The man told me they’d be ready in an hour. I killed an hour and returned to the photo printing desk.

“I put a call out on the tannoy for you,” said the man. “What are you, deaf or something?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, fair enough then. We’ve run out of cards owing to a cock-up on the stock taking front. I’ve printed them for you anyway on normal photo paper. You can have them for free!”

Some pieces of card, a tube of Pritt Stick and the hard labour of chief elf Jess later, and they were transformed into a crude approximation of the cards they were supposed to be in the first place, so the bad news for those of you I’m sending a card to is that they don’t look very professional, but the good news is they didn’t cost me a penny! So you can hang my card on the wall and feel a warm glow in the knowledge that I didn’t spend any money on you.

Unless I don’t send you one, which is entirely possible. Nothing personal, I ran out.

Tomorrow - well, today now - I’m heading up to Lancashire and may not be returning until after Christmas, which is a very happy prospect but means I’ve had to spend much of today - well, yesterday now - tying up loose ends and making sure everything’s as shipshape as it can be so that even after a week or so of neglect, the ship that it’s the shape of won’t be too much of a wreck on my return. Which has meant that I’ve been very busy indeed and it’s now far too late, and I haven’t really got time to regale you with entertaining anecdotes pertaining to my day, which is a pity because if I had the time to do it properly, I reckon I could have wrung a good blog entry out of my failed attempt to go to… well, I can’t tell you where I was trying to go to, because I was trying to go there to buy a Christmas present for someone who reads this, and if they knew where I was trying to go to, it would rather give away what I was trying to get them. Though since I failed they won’t be getting it anyway, so actually it wouldn’t have been giving away anything at all.

In any case, I haven’t got time to do it properly, so you aren’t going to hear about that.

But what you are going to hear about is this year’s Christmas meet. You’ll recall that I gave you a nice shiny form to fill in so I could work out what date suits the most of you. Well, I’m afraid I made a bit of a mess of it, with the result that you’re all going to have to go and fill it in again. Sorry about that. It will work now. I actually tested it this time.

Several of the dates on the form have now passed, but I never really expected people to be free before January anyway. And since we’re on the subject, it looks as though the most probable location will be a public house called The Pelican in Addlestone - subject to change if 97% of the people who fill in the form live in Edinburgh, of course, but for the moment that’s looking quite likely.

Now I’m going to go and pack. Good night - well, morning now.

Hello!

Partly due to the fact that I’ve been working very hard of late and have only now caught up with my work sufficiently that skiving is even an option, and partly because I’m ill (just a teensy bug, don’t feel sorry for me. I’m about as unill as it’s possible to be without actually being healthy), today I elected to do as little work as I could possibly get away with and spend the rest of my time mooching around doing very little. It was fun. I should skive more often.

But it does mean that I’m cutting it a bit fine with one of the jobs I neglected to do. I’ve drawn a picture with a view to getting it printed onto lots of Christmas cards to send out to my chums, and the next step is getting it printed. My printer’s playing up at the minute - due, I suspect, to a botched attempt to refill the toner cartridges, and easily resolved by purchasing new ones, but I haven’t got round to it yet - so I intended instead to make use of Tesco’s photo printing service. The problem I have is that I’ll be going up north on Friday, and probably coming back down south on Sunday, but since my lovely Jess commences her Christmas holiday early next week there’s the possibility that I’ll decide to stay up there, which means that if I don’t get my cards sent out before I go, I might not get another chance before the last posting date for Christmas.

It does occur to me as I type this that they also have Tescos in the northern part of the country, but I’d still feel happier getting them sorted before I leave, which means I’d need them to be ready for collection tomorrow, which really means I need to go to Tesco more or less nowish. But what I’m not at all sure of is whether the photo counter is even open at this time of night, so it might be a great big wasted journey, and I’m tired and I don’t feel very well, so that would be rubbish.

So I don’t think I’ll bother. I’ll go to bed with a nice fruit salad and a good book instead. If I send you a Christmas card and it doesn’t arrive until some time around the new year, well, I’m sorry but you’ll just have to find the strength within you to cope.

Actually I feel like something hot. Maybe I’ll microwave a potato instead.

As the last posting date for Christmas draws nearer, so the glut of businesses leaving their Christmas card design to the last minute subsides, and I get my life back. Look, I’m even blogging!

This weekend, Jess was mostly snotty. I decided that she’d be able to sleep more soundly without all that snot seeping onto the pillow, so I announced that I was going to cure her with the assistance of Mr Internet. She seemed reluctant and sceptical, but I wasn’t to be deterred.

So I consulted Mr Internet and, on his advice, made her kneel down over a sink of hot water with a towel over her head, inhaling the lovely vapours. Unfortunately this had no effect whatsoever, so I sought Mr Internet’s advice once again.

“What you want to do,” he told me, “is make a nice hot drink consisting mainly of tomato juice, garlic, tabasco sauce, curry powder, molten lava, the fire of ten thousand suns, and a Cadbury’s creme egg for flavour.”

Convinced that this was the elixir that would cure her ills, I dragged her to the kitchen in the face of considerable protest, Jess assuring me along the way that a) there was no way she was going to drink this, and b) even if there was way she was going to drink it, she still wouldn’t be drinking it, because there was no way we’d have all the ingredients. I admitted that this was probably true, but I was confident we could come close.

Taking it for granted that we wouldn’t have any tomato juice - we never have tomato juice - I headed straight for the cupboard with the tins in with a view to cannibalising a tin of tomatoes. Jess headed for the fridge, with a view to demonstrating to me that we didn’t have any tomato juice.

“You see, we haven’t got any tomato juice,” she began to say, before spotting something on the shelf that forced her to rephrase the sentence as: “There’s a carton of tomato juice here.”

Much to my surprise, I was then able to locate every other ingredient we needed, so I set about concocting the curative. It seemed only fair that I should endure the ordeal as well, so I made enough for two.

It was’t that bad. Well, I didn’t think so. Jess seemed to have a different opinion, but she forced it down. As her face went red, her eyes watered, and steam came out of her ears, I did wonder momentarily whether this was a good idea, but I knew it would be worth it when she was able to go back to bed with unclogged sinuses and dream happy dreams about bunnies without having to worry about her head becoming stuck to the pillow with congealed snot.

It didn’t do the slightest bit of good.

Much to my surprise, after spending two weeks trying to persuade me that the root cause of my Internet woes was my modem, or my computer, or BT, or Jupiter being in the ascendant, TalkTalk suddenly announced today that they’ve fixed it, and all the evidence indicates that they have. Look how fast I can go! Wheeeeeeeeee! Oh high speed Internet access, how I’ve missed you. Let’s never part again.

So now I can finally get back on top of my work, which I’ve been so far from the top of lately I was beginning to think I’d never get there without the assistance of a couple of Sherpas and a winch. I was planning to pull an all nighter, but my wrist is starting to ache in a manner that seems to say “I’d really stop drawing now if I were you, unless you want to get crippled by RSI in ten years and have to get a proper job again", so I’m going to down tools and go to bed.

Or maybe I’ll stay up all night playing on the Internet. Just because I can.

So TalkTalk’s still rubbish. Half the time I can’t get online at all, and the rest of the time the Internet creaks along so slowly that more often than not it fails to load web pages, something those fine but clueless people at TalkTalk tech support seem incapable of grasping.

“How slow is your connection sir?”

“Very slow.”

“Can you please go to http://speedtester.bt.com/ and tell me what speed it says your line is?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no, I can’t load that page. My connection’s too slow.”

“How slow is it?”

“Very slow.”

Did I mention that TalkTalk’s rubbish? It’s proving very difficult to run an Internet based business without Internet access, with the result that anything else I might like to do with my time - things like cook healthy food, or go for long healthy walks, or sleep - has been put on the back burner for the duration. Except for all the things I like to do at the weekend, naturally. Some things are sacrosanct.

And while we’re talking business, an update on the figures we discussed a couple of days ago. I reported that my aim of reducing my spending by 30% had differed dramatically from the reality. I’ve realised since that there was an error in my figures, on account of me having accidentally deleted a fairly crucial row from my spreadsheet. This reinstated, and a different picture is painted altogether. My spending, I was pleased to discover, hasn’t increased by 18.96% after all. Unfortunately it’s increased by 51.03%.

That isn’t very good, is it?

For the last seven months, my desktop wallpaper has been this image:

…which tells you far more about my financial affairs than I probably ought to be revealing here, but there we go. Obviously the aim of this rather unattractive wallpaper was to focus my mind on the objective of reaching certain targets over the next seven months relative to the seven that had just finished. I could possibly do an analogy about cows in the Nile at this point, but on the other hand, possibly not.

That period came to an end a week ago. Apart from putting this image on my desktop, I had done absolutely nothing to ensure that my goals were met, so it’s either a great advert for subconscious conditioning or sheer coincidence that I did a pretty good job of meeting most of them - though the one that I didn’t meet, I missed quite spectacularly. Shall I give you an executive summary?

My earnings, which I’d hoped to increase by 50%, went up by 50.38%. That’s a massive 0.38% above my target! One point to me.

Advertising costs I’d pencilled in to decrease by 30%. The reality was a decrease of 28.75%. Close enough.

Miscellaneous business expenses - which in the first seven months had mostly comprised an expensive printer and lots of envelopes, and which I anticipated comprising very little in the second seven - fell by not my targeted 75% but a whopping 97.25%. So far so good. I’m going to be rich!

‘Other’ - a fairly sweeping category that takes in petrol, pizza, holidays, and the general excesses of my debauched and hedonistic lifestyle - I felt I should reign in by 30%. Unfortunately it went in completely the wrong direction and rose by 18.96%. Oops.

I’m never going to be rich.