Christmas 2006 has been delayed by approximately one week. Loz and Grant apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Dear all

Royal Mail is alas not on our side for this year, with the result that some of you may get Christmas presents in January or, given my experience in the ways of international mail, not at all (see, this is very clever of me as now if you don't get a present you'll think it got lost and not that I forgot). Especially since some of the presents are in Grant's estimation likely to be regarded by customs as dummy scents to put off sniffer dogs and impounding may therefore also be a possibility.

In any case, given the cost of sending odd sized packages from the UK in the week before Christmas you can all regard yourselves as having been given postage for Christmas!

In conclusion: sorry to scrooge up Christmas, promise to do better next year.

In update news: I am now officially on holidays from Uni which is a bit odd given that I only just started, but I am not complaining. We spent the last weekend recovering from Italy and, in Grant's case, his very first full week of work. In my case I am kind of over the few months I spent desperately wanting a job to validate my existence (grief/anger) and am onto the acceptance stage in so far as that could be regarded as referring to sleeping in til 8am, actual housework including IRONING MY HUSBAND'S SHIRTS (sorry Grant, I am never letting that go), and the occasional bout of actual uni work. Leisurely research can be such a lovely way to spend an afternoon, provided Westlaw is behaving itself of course. Also I drink tea. And it is good.

I should add at the weekend there was a fair bit of pre-Christmas running about (or faffing about as I should say) and a fat lot of good that did us thanks to postage issues. Grr. Also, we had lovely lunch at the Orangery in Kensington Palace Gardens which is my favourite tea-type place so far and where I am going to drag everyone who comes to visit.

In other news, no beetroot has dared stain my hands for 30 years. I bought three last week, and the first didn't stain my hands either. I smugly concluded as a result of all the above that the cookbooks with their crazy exhortations about cutting in rubber gloves were quackdoctors or in the alternative that I have weird teflon coated hands or something conferring a natural immunity. However, I cooked the other two beetroot from the same source today, and now look like I have weird skin condition or perhaps like I should be scrubbing my hands and screaming OUT DAMNED SPOT. How is it possible that the beetroots could betray me so?

End note: we have a new webcam thingy and we just frantically cleaned the flat so feel free to call by skype and demand video provided you do it in the next 24 hours. After that we will no doubt have trashed the place, Loz and Grant-style.