It's nice to hear that pretty much everybody else seems to have had a good Christmas. I, unfortunately, did not have a good Christmas, because I've spent most of this week basically incapacitated by flu.

So my Christmas Day largely involved me sitting on the sofa watching DVDs I'd seen before and trying not to move too much. The original plan had been that Mum would come to visit and I'd cook her a big Christmas roast dinner; instead, she came round and cooked me a small and inoffensive omelette, which was about all my beleaguered metabolism could cope with.

That made yesterday the first Christmas Day in my whole life (at least since I was old enough to remember them at all) which didn't involve some sort of appropriately Christmassy celebration. I feel surprisingly unhappy about that. It's not that anything's actually been lost, as such – Mum and I plan to have a postponed celebration at some later point once I'm well. And it's not even as if I've gone without Christmas dinner so far this year: I cooked an early one for Dad a week ago, and the Gallery did its usual excellent one the week before that. But, somehow, it isn't the same.