Saturday 7th January 2023

You may have noticed that this year my Christmas message was: no Christmas message.

Things aren’t the same since She went. Harry Rollo’s theory is that the whole world will now unravel starting with Margrethe Denmark who blundered with her younger son the minute Lilibet was gone, having never put a foot wrong for 50 years. Then there was Lady Susan…

But there were events, Despite the thick Christmas blanket, this year with added strangulation effect for fear of being struck down or even ‘restrictions’ as many crave.

For instance the Gay Mother bought a swede. She bought it herself from Tesco and was helped to carry it to her car in which she self-drove the swede home and made a soufflé out of it with the rest mashed and baked. With the swede she was well pleased.

After all we did have a Christmas tree. I found actual pine plants for sale in the Far West. The seller had had the brain wave of spraying fake frost on them. Only about 10″ high but a tree all the same and a living plant so can be planted out for growth. Four or five baubles were fixed to it by the Gay Mother which was as much as she could manage with her ancient fingers.

So that was Christmas. The bird came off all right.

Really Christmas is Nothing going Wrong – especially with the bird.

Another event was in France, where Laura Malcolm enquired where Frankie-Doreen kept her Fleur de Sel. It turned out she didn’t. Didn’t have any! Laura in meltdown. The Fleur de Sel outrage was re-enacted every day of the visit. On the way back, Laura Malcolm, Matt Driver and I, Adrian Edge, were in a cabin together on the over-night crossing – i.e. sleeping.  It was their cabin in which I was a hanger-on. But Laura liked the boarding-school effect and we built up a whole boys’ boarding school scenario in that cabin because Matt Driver was also at a boarding school. Poor little boys either hoping nobody would hear their sobs or else amusing themselves after lights-out, both singly and in groups.

The incredible thing is Matt Driver’s salary exceeds or equals that of any major CEO in the United Kingdom, Laura Malcolm is a bestselling novelist and as for me, Adrian Edge, I am Landed Gentry. Yet, there we were crammed into that cabin. I hope the public will take heart.