It's an odd thing about this time of year: there are certain classes of item which, if you buy them for yourself for completely non-Christmas-related reasons, they still feel like Christmas presents if bought in late December.

Last week my old low-end digital camera finally gave up the ghost, after a prolonged battle with internal injuries sustained some years ago due to my own incompetence. <f/x: moment of silence> So today I wandered into town and treated myself to a new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX10, which cost about the same and is approximately an order of magnitude more functional in every possible way.

At least, if you believe the manual. I haven't been able to actually test it yet, because its battery has to be charged for two hours before first use. This is possibly contributing further to the feeling of it being Christmas swag: I've now got that feeling of small-child Christmas-morning impatience, when you dive out of bed at about six in the morning desperate to go and start opening the presents, but your parents for some reason keep telling you to wait while they finish doing all sorts of pathetically unimportant stuff like getting dressed. But-it's-not-fair-why-can't-I-play-with-it-NOW!

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 :-)