I made the picture mentioned below and here it is. No, it's not very special, is it? My main concern was whether Jack and Pippin's heads looked about the right size in proportion to one another. Also, does the placement of Pippin's hand make him look like his arm is broken? How cool is it that I managed to make Pippin's hand overlap Jack's shoulder but at the same time the scrimshaw in Jack's hair overlap Pippin's curls? That creates the illusion of interaction in three dimensions, that does. Wouldn't it have looked a lot better with a beach-and-palm-trees backdrop, except I couldn't find one and was concerned about lighting issues?

I am not eating right. What did I have to eat today? A meal replacement shake instead of breakfast, no lunch, some peanuts and potato chips in the evening, a piece of barbecued rump steak and an orange. For some reason it is even harder to eat normally when my whole family is at home all the time than when I am on my own. You don't have to justify or explain or even talk about what you fix to eat when you're on your own. A grilled chicken patty and a bowl of Crunchy Nut? Okay. What-the-hell-ever. It all looks the same once you swallow it.

Happily, I will NOT be spending New Year's Eve at home with my parents like every other blimmin' year, with the exception of two when, I must say, I nearly got laid. Don't know if I will nearly get laid this year. Wouldn't count on it. I'm going up to Paihia with my sister and her friend Rebecca. I don't know very much about Rebecca except she has red hair and big feet (they are friends partly because they bonded over having big feet) and I rather like her photos (she's another artist). They are both going on the Camp America programme as counsellors next year. At Paihia there will be many, many drunk young people and a concert by Pacifier. Happily, my period should be over by then.

This evening there was a locally made TV special about Lord of the Rings with many original interview segments with the cast, carried out by the two anchors from TVNZ's yoof news programme. I don't know if Viggo Mortensen does this for just any reporter, or only New Zealand ones, or only cute New Zealand ones who are so excited about interviewing him that they have showed up wearing rubber elf ears, but he declared that he felt too far away from them on that very nice carved wood chair that I bet you've been noticing in RotK premiere interview footage, and padded over (he had bare feet) to sit on both their laps. Well, he kind of sat between their laps, with his bottom on the floor and his torso leaning back between their two chairs so they could both hug him. Of course they both hugged him. Anyone will do anything for Viggo Mortensen in New Zealand.

'I'm Viggo Mortensen, can you spare a beer?' 'YES!' 'My feet are a little tired.' 'LET ME BATHE THEM AND DRY THEM WITH MY HAIR!' 'That's a nice-looking dog.' 'HE'S YOURS!' I don't think anyone else can elicit quite this level of pashy adoration, even royalty or Evil Richard from Coronation Street (although Evil Richard comes pretty close). So anyway, it was the most affectionate interview I ever saw (even allowing for the time Havoc and Newsboy interviewed a bemused Nicole Kidman with News sitting on Havoc's knee like a ventriloquist's dummy), with both the anchors, boy and girl, cuddling Viggo and petting his hair as they asked their questions and he answered. At one point he pulled the girl anchor's offside leg over his shoulder and petted and played with her foot (bare feet being the order of the day - it's Polynesia, people are casual), praising it for being small and pretty. When they concluded the interview they gave him a 'sandwich kiss' (they each kissed him on one temple) and he said 'Can I have one more?' and got it. Viggo Mortensen is one very loved-up dude, that's all I'm saying, and if he happened to feel like claiming droit de seigneur round these parts the queue would be phenomenal. We can only hope he never decides to use his immense power over New Zealanders for evil. He actually probably could take over here as King. I just want you to clearly understand that.

I think one of the keys to understanding how New Zealand feels about the LotR stars is that the country is like this bright, quite cute but socially awkward teenage girl at a party where everyone's a few years older than her. When someone charismatic and interesting like Viggo Mortensen not only spontaneously takes an interest and spends a lot of time with her, but takes photos of her and writes poetry about her, she is flattered to bits and pieces and gushes, blushes and giggles with adoration.

Of course there are thousands of New Zealanders of whom this metaphor is completely unrepresentative. And good for them!

You see, some of them prefer Orlando Bloom.

I should, perhaps, have mentioned that my contact lenses are getting quite well broken in. I watched RotK through them and they didn't give me any gyp. I can still feel them on my eyes quite a lot of the time, but they aren't uncomfortable.

On Nekomusume.net there has been a great deal of silliness perpetrated by myself and one 'jigglykat' concerning... actually, it's hard to tell what it started out to be about, but given that her two favourite movie characters of the moment are Cap'n Jack Sparrow and Pippin 'Fool of a' Took, and given the propensity of girls who use the internet a lot to role-play conversations with their favourite characters or performers, pretending they are friends or paramours (I haven't noticed boys doing this much, but somehow it would be creepy if they did. We can get away with it without appearing too depraved. Kind of like how a woman wearing men's clothes is tomboyish or scruffily cute, but a man wearing women's clothes is in drag and open to ridicule - there are lines we can cross more successfully than they mostly can, and I think it's one of the few beneficial side effects of our gender still not being taken really seriously) - er, getting back to my sentence, jigglykat and I have been writing a lot of silly dialogues between Cap'n Jack and Pippin, discussing the relative merits of Green Dragon ale and Jamaica rum, getting tiddly and singing yo-ho/hey-ho songs together, etcetera. Yes, it is a strange and esoteric way to have fun, and it wouldn't seem remotely amusing to most humans, but wouldn't you rather we did this than smoke crack and go crazy? After all, we find it a hoot and a half, and all that laughing staves off cancer. You wouldn't want the world to be robbed of a future animator and English teacher because they didn't laugh enough. And other arguments for not just smacking us in the head for being weird nerds.

jigglykat, with her cousin Emily who runs somethingtookish.org (not to be confused with somethingawful.com), has been making little animated forum avatars based on Pip and Jack, and their most recent collaboration is this little piece of double-takery. Isn't that eerie? Didn't they get the lighting and colours just right so that Billy Boyd really appears to be in the same space as Johnny Depp? I think that's so clever. Cleverness trivially applied, of course, but I always say one of the ways you can tell people are highly evolved and live in a fairly advanced civilisation is that they've got time for trivia. I am very, very defensive today, aren't I? Trying to justify my existence, perhaps.

Airandangels.com got a new index page today, the first for many months, just because the hobbitses have got me mildly fired up with inspiration. It's, er, it's meant to be that plain, yes, that's it. That's the picture off the lid of the smart new tin pencil box I have bought for next year at school. I scanned the actual box, which is why the image quality isn't superb, but I think it looks okay. I just adore that picture; it's so cute and, God help me, so wholesome. Anyway, I have been planning my own Photoshop experiment, although I have some concerns about my ability to get things like colours from different source images and the scale of human/hobbit figures looking correct and well-matched: I'm going to try to make a picture with Pippin's arm slung round Cap'n Jack's shoulders, as a tchotchke for jigglykat. A piece of flair, if you will. And also just because it will amuse me mightily.

I just got back from ROTK. Rather than any sort of coherent review (which I leave to wiser heads than mine) here is a jumble of my impressions from this movie.

- Is it just really weird that Sean Astin is reminding me of Melanie Lynskey and Billy Boyd is reminding me of Alyson Hannigan? In Boyd's case it's mostly because it hit me about a third of the way through the movie that he has almost the identical cupid's bow upper lip and this is very pretty. But Astin just seems to be doing some of the same faces and looks as Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures. (For dopey fun, imagine him saying 'I think your drawering's fentestuc!' or 'But we're all going to heaven!') There is probably some peculiar love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name connection my brain is making, as I tend to slash-ship Merry and Pippin, and Sam and Frodo (although I see that as more one-sided, with Sam loving Frodo very much and Frodo appreciating but unable to return his feelings; whereas the affection between Merry and Pip would be mutual, uncomplicated and equal), and the roles I know both these actresses best in are lesbian characters. I romanticise homosexuality in fiction, it's one of my oddities. I am much more cynical about real people.

- As always, I am glad Gollum was with his precious in the end. Apart from it, really, being the only possible happy ending for that character, it tickles my fancy that Middle-Earth is saved by someone who was trying to do something else at the time.

- Darting sideways, my brain is seeing stronger and stronger parallels between Aragorn's wish to stay a ranger and Carrot's wish to stay a watchman in the Discworld books. There is so much dramatic tension there, building with Vetinari's increasing frailty, the fact that Vimes now has a son to fight for, and his growing unease with his protégé, not to mention how Angua may feel; if Pratchett never tries to detonate it and settle once and for all the question of Ankh-Morpork's king or lack thereof I shall feel quite robbed. Found myself thinking of it also in the shot of Denethor sitting in his smaller chair at the foot of the throne dais. I wonder if the throne of Gondor crumbles when you poke it?

- First prize for Disgusting Mediaeval Eating goes to Denethor.

- I wuv Pippin. I wuv Sam. I am utterly, unrepentantly soppy about both of them. It is all right to be soppy about hobbits because hobbits are soppy themselves. This is part of why they are so nice.

- If Aragorn and Arwen's snog doesn't win Best Kiss at the next MTV movie awards, it will be a travesty. One of my friends on Nekomusume.net said it best: 'I liked the way he jumped on Arwen and tried to eat her.'

- Although Frodo kissing Sam goodbye (all right, on the forehead) should also be a finalist. Setting my inverted romanticism aside, I think it's sweet and good and right that the hobbits are totally unselfconscious about things like holding hands, hugging and kissing each other, hopping onto their friend's hospital bed to give him a cuddle, in moments of emotion. A lot of it really reads as presexual affection and belongs with their child-role.

- I also liked the implication that the scene we don't see, only Frodo, Merry and Pippin's reactions to it, of Sam declaring his feelings to Rosie in the pub involved another quite impressive snog. Get in there, my son.

- Apparently giant-spider-silk contains some cleansing agent. When Shelob wraps Frodo up his face is grey with dirt, and when Sam picks the strands off his face, it is not only bloodlessly pale but almost entirely clean. Maybe the dirt stuck to the silk and peeled off, like one of those Biore pore-clearing strips that you can't get in the shops here any more and I love them.

- Every one of those guards who did what Denethor told him re the pyre should be spanked. There is a POINT at which decent, sensible people say 'No, sir, you are barking, sir, stand down, sir.' Or even people who just have brains of their own.

- Orlando Bloom needs to do a movie not involving hijacked pirate ships and cursed zombies, quick, before he gets typecast. I suggest a witty musical romantic comedy co-starring Robbie Williams and Ewan McGregor. But you know that.

- I was particularly pleased by the casting of Déagol in the prologue, as I recognised this actor from several other Peter Jackson productions. He was the pioneering filmmaker in the mockumentary Forgotten Silver and the hapless boy who has to ask Juliet to dance in the deleted 'Party at the Bennetts' scene from Heavenly Creatures (which loyal Borovnians still hope may one day be included on a special edition DVD). So when Peter Jackson has asked him to be in a movie, he's inadvertently filmed his own death, been humiliated by Kate Winslet, and been strangled by Gollum. He keeps coming back. God bless him.

Every LOTR movie has a Glorious Shortland Street Recognition Moment or two. In FotR you get Guy Warner the social worker and Dr Leonard Dodds being elves; in TTT you get darling Lionel Skeggins the 'lapsed vet' and café proprietor and head nurse Ellen Crozier as Rohirrim; in RotK Dr Martin Stickwell is the sub-steward guy in Minas Tirith whose job is basically to point out what deep shit they are in. The fact that his Shorty Street character's nickname is Sticky caused me to laugh inappropriately when Frodo, blundering about in Shelob's lair, touches some spider-spooge and blurts 'It's sticky! What is it?' What makes this all the more eerie is that Leonard, Lionel and Sticky have all simply been variations on the same character, the dorky guy with low self-esteem but a fine intelligent mind and heart of gold, who the writers periodically work in as a foil to handsome, confident male leads like Chris Warner. Yes, that's not a usual sort of part for Marton Csokas to play any more, is it?

It was a fine, fine movie and now I have begun looking forward to the extended DVD version. There is always more 'extra' for me in the extended DVD than anyone else as I have always missed one or two scenes at the theatre due to having to run out and pee, quick like a bunny. In this case I just lost a little bit in between Aragorn and his multicultural sidekicks setting out for the Paths of the Dead, and Théoden telling Merry to stay back with the girls like a good hobbit.

And is anything, anything cuter than Pippin finding Merry on the battlefield and telling him he's going to look after him?

I wanted to see if there were any Quizillas with 'geisha' in the title. I guess I got what I deserved.

You're A Ninja! You like life in the shadows, know 100 plus ways to
kill someone, and even more ways to dispose of
a body ... and you're an excellent chef

Pirate, Ninja, Wench or Geisha?
brought to you by Quizilla

Sayuri. Originally known as Chiyo, the ocean flows
in your veins. You are breathtakingly lovely,
but even your beauty cannot protect you from
heartache. In the end, however, your life will
be happy. Your favorite quote is, "I
wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha. I
wasn't even born in Kyoto...most people would
rather carry on their fantasies that my mother
and grandmother were geisha, and that I began
my training when I was weaned from the
breast."

What geisha are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

The second one refers to Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha - which character are you. I really think I'd like to mix my career paths and be a pirate geisha/geisha pirate. Someone on the high seas has to have a more unusual look than Cap'n Jack Sparrow, and I think I'd enjoy making off with large quantities of treasure cackling 'The world is my danna!' and playing shamisen power-chords. Everyone says geisha are rootbound by tradition and no longer move with the times. I'll show them. And I'll look hot (in a stylised way) while doing it. Why, I'll team up with Jack. We can do each other's makeup.

Hmm. This is different.

You are Claudia Kishi. Exotic, creative and
artistic. You hate being compared to your
genius sister Janine, which is why you have to
hide your Nancy Drew mysteries from your
parents. You have your own unique fashion
style, and despite being addicted to junk food,
you haven't got a blemish on you. How lucky!

Which Baby-Sitters Club Member Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

For what it's worth, I hate that picture of Claudia, the worst one Hodges Soileau did. She looks like she has Down's Syndrome and someone's tickling her. Most people who know me (and are prepared to think analytically about The Baby-Sitters Club, so basically just Nadia) would say I am more like Janine, and my sister Kate is Claudia - she's the artist and I am the intellectual, after all. But Claudia is my favourite character. She's the most cheerfully warped Baby-Sitter, the one most likely to be living in total chaos at the age of thirty but also most likely to be doing something really interesting. I would like to be her friend (back off, Stacey). I would also like to introduce her to some decent junk food; it is just criminal that a girl with her Japanese heritage and love of snacks does not appear to know about Pocky.

Actually, I remember Kate, Nadia and I brainstorming once about what the BSC would be doing as adults, if they'd grown up year by year from the age of twelve/thirteen in 1985 when the first books came out. It got very soap-opera-ish (we were trapped on a boat on a hot day and were getting punchy). From memory:
Kristy Thomas - PE teacher and girls' softball coach at Stoneybrook Middle School. A demon fundraiser and tragic closet lesbian. Trains guide dogs for the blind and disabled. Adored by her students. No partner or children.
Mary Anne Spier - Married on-again-off-again sweetheart Logan Bruno (who is a successful but unscrupulous business lawyer) and settled down to be a housewife and do lots of scrapbooking. Has many, many cats; fertility is a problem. Unknown to her, Logan is having an affair with fellow former BSC associate member Shannon Kilbourne, with whom he works. Kristy is aware of the affair but delaying saying anything about it, partly because she is reluctant to shatter Mary Anne's little world and partly because she is desperately jealous, having a crush on Shannon.
Claudia Kishi - Living in a sunlit loft apartment in New York City and exhibiting her quirky photorealist paintings and expressionist sculpture in between teaching art therapy to handicapped children. Has one preschool-aged daughter from her marriage to a traditional artist she met while studying in Japan. Since their divorce (he got a bit too traditional) she has been bedevilled by her ex-mother-in-law who feels that Claudia is an unfit mother, and just plain weird. Still dresses like that. Shares the apartment with
Stacey McGill - Who has combined her love of math and fashion, working as a high-powered accountant for Bloomingdale's. Stacey appears to be modelling her life as much as possible on that of Rachel from Friends while avoiding anything resembling Ross. Always impeccably groomed and dressed, she spends her evenings flitting from bar to restaurant to club, and always winds up crying with her head on the kitchen table while Claudia makes tea. Starting to get desperate about not being married yet. Managing her diabetes quite well, though, once the whole 'shooting up in the bathroom' misunderstanding was cleared up at work.
Abby Stevenson - No-one knows. Most recent (unconfirmed) sighting with the Peace Corps in Guatemala. Still on the run from That Incident on prom night.
Dawn Schafer - Still in close contact with stepsister Mary Anne, but living in San Diego where she teaches at a Montessori kindergarten. Married (in a Wiccan handfasting ceremony) to a blond dreadlocked guy who runs a health-food shop. A walking talking California cliche.
Jessica Ramsey - A leading light of the NYC Ballet and happily married to a very political young man who teaches the deaf. Partly because childbearing would seriously damage her dance career and partly because they were particularly qualified to do so, they have adopted a congenitally deaf baby boy of unknown heritage, who plays with Claudia's daughter. Often finds herself on the phone listening to the troubles of
Mallory Pike - Children's librarian at Stoneybrook Public Library, chafing under the martinet rule of Claudia Kishi's mother, never quite getting any of the eight picture-book manuscripts she has prepared published, and constantly trying to get her many teenage siblings to stop crashing at and bringing dates to her small, book-lined apartment.

Whew. That is getting outta hand.

Surfing the crimson wave. Reeoww. Consequently I am showered and up at an unnatural time for a Saturday morning. ROTK today, I am assured by my mother. We are supposed to go to a showing around five o'clock, since my father and Greg will be doing something to Beatrice Boat in the middle of the day. I am not sure what I will do today. I'm kind of expecting the cramps to last most of the morning, and they put a pinch in my enthusiasm for anything much. I do not have horrendous cramps when I menstruate but I do get uncomfortable.

Looking at the Village cinemas website, I guess it's the 5:25 show at Highland Park that we want. If we go earlier I can check what the car radio/tape decks are like at $uper ¢heap Auto in that horseshoe of shops next door.

Well, we didn't go to ROTK, because my mother decided to invite her friends to dinner, and I've been riding a premenstrual rollercoaster of depression, anger, nausea and just plain disgust with everything. Spent ages going round the shops with my parents comparison-shopping for a new dishwasher. Nothing would please my father but one of the new Fisher & Paykel Dish-Drawers, purely because they are the newest thing and the most expensive. All their features that he tried to cite as conveniences are actually moot to me and my mother, since we do not experience any inconvenience in those departments. A Dish-Drawer is good if you don't produce enough dirty dishes in a day to fill a standard dishwasher. We fill and run ours about twice a day. The separate drawers are also a handy feature for people whose strict kosher dietary codes mean that they can't wash dishes that held certain different foods together. We're heathens. It is nice that it is so water-economical and energy-efficient, but we can't pay that much for economy and efficiency. So we had to spend a lot of time saying no, explaining why we were saying no, and trying to get him to stop sulking because we had said no. One thing my father and sister have in common is not being able to distinguish well between 'me turning down your suggestion for a reason which I can explain' and 'me personally dissing you just to be contrary and mean.'

You remember how I was pleased about the car kit? Well, bugger that. It turns out that the tape deck in my car stereo is broken. It won't play tapes and, delightfully, you have to remove it from the dashboard and poke inside it with a Swiss Army knife to make it eject any you have unwisely put in. The kit is useless. I am going to have to buy a new radio/tape deck unit. Apparently they are fairly cheap compared with ones with a built-in CD player. It is still a pain in the guts.

If I don't get to see ROTK tomorrow, I think I shall scream and scream until I make myself sick.

I think the Christmases in between ceasing to be a kid yourself, and having kids of your own, have a certain fallow 'was that it?' quality. This was also one of those Christmases where you have to trade off present points against something you actually need but can't buy for yourself. For financial reasons, my new contact lenses are counted as my major present, and even then my mother keeps exclaiming that they cost more than she thought they would. Of the loot, there are one or two things I genuinely like very much and am grateful for (the Neil Finn concert DVD from my sister, the car kit from my parents so I can listen to my CDs through the tape deck) and the rest tail away from frustrating (after I specifically asked on my Christmas list not to be given ornaments because I have nowhere to keep them, my grandmother gave me a freakin' candelabrum) to incomprehensible (a photobook of the locations in Dorset that inspired Thomas Hardy when writing about the fictional Wessex). Such is Christmas. Anyway, I am really hoping that today will finally be declared the day we can go and see Return of the King.

Yes, Christmas is about presents and treats for me. I see my family all the time anyway, God knows we live in each other's pockets, and hey, people, I'm a pagan. Actually, the term I prefer is heathen. Have yourselves a merry little solstice.

You know, at some stage during today I am probably going to have to say 'It's Christmas Eve' so my father can say 'Don't call me Eve.' It's that sort of family. I have made the pavlova for tomorrow's feasting, with some swearing because I can never seem to separate the six eggs required without wasting at least two. At least the messed-up ones went into a saucepan and my mother scrambled them for her lunch. I was going to try and give you a link to the recipe at Jo Seagar's website, but she doesn't have it listed there, so I shall just transcribe it from the cookbook because this is such a good recipe; more people should make it, and I would especially like to see the pav gain popularity worldwide. I believe it is becoming fairly well known in the United Kingdom (there is even a joke in a Discworld book that relies on the reader knowing a pavlova is made of meringue), but that leaves a lot of world to conquer.

It should be stated before we begin that the meringue-and-cream cake called a pavlova was invented in New Zealand. Australia is always trying to claim credit for the pavlova, just like they do with Phar Lap and Russell Crowe, but the fact is that the earliest recognisable-as-such pavlova recipe was published in New Zealand and, while I would not cast aspersions upon the Australian national character in general, in this specific case they are liars. And about Phar Lap. And about Russell. This is a fairly serious matter of national pride, rivalry and pudding. On to the recipe, which is Jo's; the parentheses are mine.

Jo's Pavlova
Serves 8-10
Ingredients
6 egg whites, at room temperature
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 cups castor sugar (plain white granulated sugar will also do, but for better results whiz it in a food processor/Cuisinart-type thing to make the grains finer)
1 tablespoon cornflour
1 tablespoon malt vinegar
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
whipped cream (for topping)

In a large metal, porcelain or glass bowl, whisk egg whites, salt and cream of tartar until soft peaks form (to hell with whisking, I use a hand-held electric beater). Gradually, a teaspoon at a time (although if you get impatient you could up it to a dessertspoon; God knows I do), add castor sugar, whisking continuously until all the sugar has been added and incorporated into egg white. The mixture should be very thick, shiny and glossy. Sift cornflour over egg white and fold in, then fold in vinegar and vanilla. Spoon the mixture onto a tinfoil- or baking-paper-covered baking tray, smoothing out to a dinner-plate-sized circle. (Make this easier for yourself: put a dinner plate face down on the baking paper, trace round it with a pencil and use this as your guide when sculpting the mixture. You'll need a spatula (the rubbery kind) for this. It requires a firm hand.)

Bake in a low oven, 140ºC, turning down if the pavlova starts to colour (goes brown, that is). Bake for 1 1/2 hours, or until crisp and dry, with a cracked top. Cool on the tray, then carefully peel off the paper or tinfoil when cold.

Spread the top generously with whipped cream and garnish as you wish.

-

There, actually, is where Jo and I part company, because while I agree with her about the generous use of whipped cream I do not put it on the top of the pav. You see, a good pavlova has a thick, crunchy crust of meringue with a chewy, marshmallowy-textured centre. The crust will be softened and spoiled rather by slathering with cream. So what you do is, you do a trick I learned from Nigella Lawson, and you invert the pav into its serving dish. Thus its soft, defenseless underbelly is uppermost, and it's easy to peel off the baking paper. You slop the cream onto the flat underside and retain the crisp crust beneath. It is imperative to use real cream that came from a cow and that you have whipped yourself. Anything out of a can or a tub does not belong on a pav. I am still afraid Americans will try to apply marshmallow fluff spread. To avert this, please consider the following list of

Suggested Toppings:
- Fresh, sliced kiwifruit, bananas, and passionfruit pulp (some pav purists claim that the only appropriate topping for a pav is passionfruit pulp, and they are wrong and crazy)
- Strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, dusted with icing sugar
- A thin layer of lemon curd spread under the whipped cream, and with slices of orange or crystallised citrus peel and mint leaves arranged on top
- Chopped chocolate, walnuts and crystallised ginger
- Pink and white marshmallows and fresh raspberries with sugared violets or rose petals
- Slices of feijoas, tamarillos, kiwanos and persimmon would look fabulous for a wintry pavlova

Of course, any combination of these, or a favourite of your own, is quite valid. Grated chocolate over the top is good. I am doing chopped kiwifruit and strawberries, for Christmassy red and green and for how nice they look, smell and taste together.

Oh, and any berries you use should be fresh or frozen, not out of a can.

Tonight I am taping the Powerpuff Girls Christmas special and going to my friend Natalie's birthday party. She had the questionable luck to be born on Christmas Eve. We are going to Denny's, of all places (I guess because there's no need for reservations, and good luck getting THOSE on Christmas Eve), so I had better take some money as I do not know whether it is the sort of party where your hosts pay the restaurant bill. How snooty it sounds when I say that. But really, we all go through life hoping someone else will pay the restaurant bill, don't we?

The weather was most disagreeable this morning but has cleared up in the afternoon. Now the threat is that this belt of blue skies and decorative white fluff-clouds will have passed over and the pursuant front of grey dreck will hit us on Christmas morning. It isn't of crucial importance since we are not trying to have the Christmas picnic this year (apparently my uncle hates it; what a cheery soul) but still, who wants a grey and white sky and 80% humidity on Christmas day?

Whoops, should've archived the page yesterday. I try to do that week by week in an orderly manner, so naturally it often doesn't happen. Yesterday's weather turned out much nicer than forecast or expected - by afternoon it was clear and bright and sunny and my mother, aunt, grandmother and I went for a walk along Eastern Beach followed by ice-creams, saying 'Gosh, the "patchy rain" they forecast turned out well, didn't it?' and 'We could do with some more of this "patchy rain"!' Yeah, we're dweebs. Today is white-skied and muggy so far but not rainy, so I'll give it a B.

Went to the supermarket this morning with Wendy to get in festive provisions. It falls to me this year to make the Christmas pavlova. Frankly, I am good at this. I use a recipe by Jo Seagar with a presentation trick by Nigella Lawson and the results are consistently impressive. Unless something really unexpected happens, I'm looking forward to eating it.

I have solved the problem of wrapping my grandmother's stupid-awkward-shaped present (a trowel) by buying a gift bag intended for a bottle of wine, which fits it very neatly. Present-wrapping was a bit of a mission this year, as my mother stocked up on some rather cheap-textured paper that ripped crosswise while you were cutting it - and I had to use a pair of herb snips because the proper orange-handled kitchen scissors were not to be found. Someone, and I am naming no names but thinking pretty uncharitably of my sister, takes the scissors to other parts of the house to use them and does not return them to their home in the kitchen, so no-one else can find them. People were always doing this with my kitchen scissors in the shared house in Cambridge and it pissed me RIGHT off. I had to keep putting notes on the fridge to get them back, because it was the sort of house where everyone keeps different hours and you can't count on getting to talk to any of them in person. I know it's an uncool thing to get cross about, but it does make me cross when I can't count on finding things where they belong.

Two more sleeps to go, then.