Christmas seemed to go off reasonably well. Went down to Dad's for a few days, and Sophie (sister) and Tim (her boyfriend) were there too, at least until they got up at good grief o'clock yesterday morning to go and catch a plane to a ski resort. So, plentiful alcohol, plentiful nice food, a couple of walks (one in the general vicinity of Watership Down, which surprised me a little since it had never occurred to me to even wonder if it might be a real place), and a few days away from home.

Unfortunately my before-leaving-the-house checklist included ‘lock the door’ but failed to include ‘do that little mental dance to make sure I can remember having locked the door’; so the holiday was slightly marred by me occasionally worrying that I might have left it open. Though, of course, when I got home I found it was perfectly all right and I'd been worrying for nothing.

Highlight of the entire trip, I think, would have to have been one of Tim's Christmas presents from his family (he brought quite a few of those and we all watched him open them :-). He got a Picoo Z indoor RC helicopter, which is a beautifully simple and robust little device. Curiously, the single most difficult thing to get it to do appears to be to make it fly forwards: it has a control for main rotor speed and one for the tail rotor, so it's easy to get it to go up and down and change its heading, but there's no control to tilt it forwards, so getting it to actually follow that heading takes skill, patience and deviousness. Still, it afforded us quite a lot of fun on Christmas Day trying to get it to fly; by the end of the day Tim seemed to be basically able to coax it gradually in a specified direction, in spite of Sophie's best efforts to shoot it down with a party popper :-)