Time to say goodbye to a faithful travelling companion. My passport is about to expire and already is in the 6-month dying phase in which a lot of countries won’t accept it.

So, I’ve filled out the form to get a new one. In a flimsy attempt to update the whole process, the Passport Service has put the application online, but can’t print it out yourself. Once you’ve filled it in they print it out themselves, and then post to you for signing so you can post it back.

Pathetic.

Anyhow, I’m reluctant to lose the stamps I’ve collected over the last couple of years, so I’ve scanned them all for safekeeping. There are a few obvious ones missing, China being the one I most regret. I managed to get in through the diplomatic channels there, which cut the three-hour process down to 30-minutes but also meant I have no record of ever having been there. I guess good contacts are not always a good thing.

Estonian passport stamp, courtesy of a short trip across the water from Finland on a very fast catamaran.

Hong Kong. One of my favourites, and a trip that was far too brief. And too hot.

Japan. Entry at Narita airport in Tokyo and exit through Kansai in Kyoto (an anagram of Tokyo and the ancient capital of Japan). Kansai is a beautiful airport, but it’s sinking.

A Korean stamp. I have mixed feelings about Korea. I made some good friends on that trip, but the food made us all very ill.

Lithuania is undoubtedly my favourite place. There’s loads to see, it’s not too far from home, it’s still a bit out of the ordinary, and the people are very very friendly.

America. Hmmm. The dullest stamps in the whole passport. Two trips to Seattle, one to Boston and one to Cincinatti. I’ve never understood what the WB that the immigration people scribble onto each stamp means.

Macau, where our guides were convinced we were going to be kidnapped by the Chinese mafia. I won $400 in the casino and was too afraid to cash in my chips until the very end of the night.

One of two stamps for Prague. This is the earlier of the two, and features a propellor plane. The second one, collected a couple of years later, had been updated to show a small private jet.

This stamp from Taiwan is pretty much the only thing made in Taiwan that doesn’t have Made in Taiwan stamped on it. Memories of Taiwan? Being stuck in an 12th floor toilet and rescued my a man who edged along a narrow ledge on the outside of the building.

Where are the days going? Sunday already. Yesterday was a lazy day spent blowing noses and eating anything that might be filled with vitamins. Was feeling far better by mid-afternoon, so headed off to Helen’s with dad and Paul for her Christmas drop-in-drop-out.

Arrived to the sound of wailing children. There were only two of them, it turned out, but it sounded like five, at least. In fairness they were very well behaved, and easily amused by a bouncing snowman that sang. Its repertoire extended to one song.

It’s fair to say that by the end of the night we knew the words pretty well.

Anyhow, we sat and chatted for two, perhaps three hours, nibbling at the huge table of food Helen had laid out, unwrapping the odd present here and there, and listening to the relaxing music filtering through from the next room. The kids went home, eventually, and all was peaceful. It was a perfect buffer-zone in the middle of the Christmas rush.

I knew a grand total of about five people there, but it didn’t really matter.

Not long after the kids had gone, though, it was time for us to move on. I loaded dad and Paul into the car and headed across town for dinner with Trevor, Jon, Graham and Roger. It had originally been planned as a sit-down until I remembered dad would still be here and Jon had had quickly rearranged things as a buffet that we ate half in the new conservatory and half on the new wipe-clean lounge laminate in the company of the cats. They barely seem to have noticed the disappearance of their carpet.

Usually we’d swap presents and that would be the last bit of Christmas but as things turned out we talked on until almost two this morning and dad was looking at his watch, no doubt thinking about his flight this afternoon. We made our excuses and left, leaving the presents behind to be opened another day, stringing out Christmas yet further.

Today was a late start, then. I am getting frighteningly efficient at switching off the alarm without even realising it – something that’s going to have to stop before going back to work – so the first I knew of the day was keys in the lock as dad headed out to get a paper. It still took another two hours to properly get up, though, which left just enough time to head out for a last meal together on the way to the station.

Checking the times of the trains, though, the crappy online timetables were forecasting seven-hour journies to get into London because the line was closed for repairs. That kind of moved everything forward. We ate tapas in town then scooted across half of Essex to find a station with some trains, resulting in me arriving for Mark’s annual games afternoon five minutes early. That wouldn’t normally be a problem, except for the fact I’d said I would be an hour late so Mark was out and Ja was asleep.

Hmmm…

Anyway, I don’t think it was any coincidence by the time they’d come back / come round and Vince, Mark 2, Nick and Peter had joined us to play Mark’s games, Mark was the winner. Sneaky practicing must surely have taken place, although I was fairly pleased to get away with claiming to have zebras in the house for a point in some game or other, on account of the fact I’ve got a picture of some.

In all, a fairly surreal afternoon, but I’m glad things are over now and look like getting back to normal. It’s been a fun Christmas, but I’m getting itchy on the creative front and want to get back to making things, not just doing things. I want to spend some time working on the book again, which has been hopelessly neglected since starting the new job. It remains stalled at 94,000 words with a lot of writing still to do.

I had vowed to not even think about editing any of it until the whole of the first draft was written, but now I’m thinking that might be the best way to get back into the flow of things. Only trouble is I might then get so hung up in the perfecting I give up on the creating.

…or perhaps I won’t like anything I’ve written so far at all.

Feeling fairly terrible, actually. The cold I’ve been fighting for a week with copious amounts of fruit and fruit juice chose yesterday to finally blossom. Woke up with a throbbing head and a nose that went from trickle to ugh over the course of the day.

That made getting out of bed very unpleasant indeed, so of course after dropping off dad at his friends I was late arriving in Galleywood. Breakfast was ready, the cat was waiting to be tickled and military-grade plans for a late lunch (‘late’ turned out to be 4.30pm) were already being put into action.

So the morning was, by necessity, fairly slow and relaxing and mainly revolved around cups of tea, and crosswords in the conservatory. No telly, on account of the fact the schedulers have so perfectly blended Christmas morning into the regular day-to-day line-up that there was nothing even vaguely worth watching.

I refuse to watch Dale Winton.

I scooted home mid-afternoon so Sal and Dan could deliver the cat. He promptly took up his regular position on a lounge chair from where he can survey two thirds of the flat and has remained there ever since, unless there’s been someone sitting where he has wanted to be, in which case he has been on top of them.

As tradition dictates we returned to Galleywood en masse, and ate masses en masse. No crackers or hats, which we’ve not had since they terrified the life out of the long-dead dog, but enough food to feed us for a week (which, in the form of curries and pies, is precisely what it will do). After that, no chance at all of doing anything energetic.

Not that we’d want to – it was dark.

So we did the unwrapping, ably aided by an inquisitive cat that insisted on pulling at the string, paper and corners of boxes so she could see in them before we could ourselves. As a kid there’s no way I’d have been able to wait until seven to open my presents. I would have been more like the cat.

Did finally succumb to the TV mid-evening, but gave up when there was suggestion Only Fools and Horses would be on next. Retreated to the safety of board games, tissues and Lemsip until it was all over, then spent the rest of the evening flopping around in front of whatever was on.

I forget what it was now.

The upstairs people are being very loud. I’m typing this in bed and I can hear the stupid woman laughing, as she always does. Her husband – I presume he’s her husband – is talking into a bucket, I think.

The downstairs people spent most of this afternoon playing very loud music. We (dad, Sal, Dan and I) countered by putting on a DVD at high volume, but as it was Fargo, where the noisiest thing is the fall of snow, the point was kind of missed.

Anyhow, I woke up feeling pretty bad this morning. I was hoping yesterday was going to be the peak, but it wasn’t. Apparently. Sal’s gone down with something remarkably similar, so we spent the day sharing a box of tissues. Everyone else was very polite and ate all the food I cooked, regardless of the potential health hazard.

Or at least I assume they did, but I’ve not checked down the back of the cushions.

I do enjoy being in on Christmas Eve. Travel is easy because so many people have stayed at home, and the office is quiet for just the same reason. And so we spent the morning eating chocolate cake and drinking gallons of tea while we listened to Abba and Christmas tunes.

Slowly the few of us who were in emptied out until by half one the only two left on our floor was Julian and myself. We walked together to HMV – heaving with last-minute panic buyers – and then said our goodbyes until the new year.

For a reason I don’t entirely understand I thought that would be a good time to have a last look around the festive shops. Ugh. Horrible experience. Big mistake. Far too many people dithering on pavements and making stupid queues at checkouts that snaked right the way through the stores.

I quickly gave up and retreated to Dean Street for drinks for Vinnie, Ross and Mark in a deserted All Bar One, then on to Sanctuary, which had promised carol singing around the piano from noon until it closed some time tomorrow morning.

Major disappointment: no pianist until half past ten.

Now there were two reasons why I wasn’t going to still be there at half ten for the singing. First was the fact dad was waiting at home and I had to cook dinner. Second was the fact that by six I could barely walk as far as the loo without going straight into a wall.

I don’t have a clue what we were drinking. Some of them were minty, and had grit mixed in with the mint leaves. Some were banana flavoured, and some were like a thick strawberry milkshake. Some came in cone-shaped glasses on long elegant stems, some in tall heavy glasses. Some were in tumblers filled with ice, with raspberries perched on the top.

All were mainly tequila. Some had vodka mixed in for good measure, and they all went down far too easily. By half six it felt like midnight and I was slowly sliding down towards the floor, along with everyone else. We decided then that we should call it a day, until a new round of gloopy yellow drinks arrived and we started all over again. It was another hour and a bit before I finally left the stool and weaved home (quite literally).

I wasn’t driving, of course, but I think the walk from the station did me some good. Still, I didn’t make it to the pub by ten to wish everyone at this end of the line a merry Christmas, but that’s probably for the best. I had no way of getting there, and no way of getting back, and if I’d made it at all, there’s a good chance I’d have seen nothing of tomorrow.

Dad’s here for his biannial visit and suddenly I feel like I’m the parent. I picked him up from his friend’s house after I’d finished work and stood there in the lounge, waiting for him with my coat on while he collected his belongings. On the table were little Christmas cookies cut into stars and heart shapes and it was like I was picking up a kid from a birthday party.

By the front door there was a row of small gold bags filled with goodies. All that was missing was the sponge cake wrapped in a napkin that had stuck to the gooey icing.

So anyway, I drove him home – to mine – and he told me all about the past month and a bit he’d spent in South America. Buenos Aires, mainly, with a bit of Uraguay thrown in for good measure. Of course, none of us had known quite where he was most of the time as beyond a postcard to say he’d arrived and another that turned up after he’d come back home and headed up north, nobody knew how to get in touch.

By the time we got out, the car was filled with what I thought was the smell of leather seeping out of his cases, but it turns out it was antelope.

Of course, all these exotic tales mean I’m craving some travel again. Sunshine and a bit of adventure would be just perfect round about now, and the Christmas TV guides being stuffed full of ads for overseas adventures certainly don’t help.

Fortunately, tomorrow is my last day in the office for this year and beyond the few pages I’ll be bringing home to write over the break I intend to take full advantage of the time off. I want to start 2004 fully recharged.

I am ready for Christmas. At last. The final bits were bought this morning, wrapped and distributed as necessary. The fridge and freezer are full. The cards are all written (including the late ones) and posted. Now we just have to sit and wait.

Was quite proud to have done all my wrapping without using even the smallest sliver of sticky tape and managing only with paper and string. Julie Andrews would have been very proud of me. Admittedly it was yellow paper, rather than brown, but at least I made the effort.

But then I got to the bottles and, after twenty minutes of fiddling – an inelegant activity somewhere between origami and macrame – I admitted defeat and got out the dispenser to stick it all together.

Saw Lord of the Rings: Return of the King last night and have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Admittedly it is very spectacular, and clever, but I did have a feeling that I was watching it because it was one of those things I should do. That’s just how I felt when I was reading the books, too.

There were good things about it, though. I genuinely squirmed through the Shelob scenes even though I knew exactly what the outcome would be. I was very impressed by the speed at which the whole thing moved, and by the quality of most of the graphics.

However, there were also some supremely dodgy graphics. There was a point where Gandalf’s sword changes from white to black to white in a single scene. Towards the end they miss out 150 of the most important pages of the whole story, and then they don’t properly explain what the whole elf-on-boat-sailing-into-sunset thing is about. Admittedly it’s not explained in the book either, and you have to venture into the Silmarillion to get a grip on it, but it would have been a far stronger closure if they’d done that here.

On the whole, I’d give it a thumbs-up, but I’m not sad the series is now over.

Thursday: Too much to drink, so much dancing. Aching knees, whistling ears. All in all, though, a fab night, even if the bar did run dry around half past ten. We set off from the office, almost the whole of the team, just before seven, and walked down through Soho to Leicester Square in a mix of eighties clothes and regular garb. Among us, some in fancy dress. A handful dressed as IRA gunmen, looking genuinely sinister in the darkness. Two being trumpeted wherever we walked by the horns of passing cars as they stumbled back and forth across the road in Fat Slags costumes. Every road or two they would be stopped in their tracks by passers-by, posing with them to have their pictures taken.

So all told, it took a long time to get to the party.

It was worth it, though. The place was heaving by the time we got there, and the queue for the cloakroom was 30-minutes long. We dumped our bags in a corner and headed for the bar where we ended up mixing pretty much everything from beer to wine to spirits and induced a cracking headache this morning. It probably didn’t help that the buffet was an Atkins-pleasing meat-fest, so the vegetarian options were lettuce, carrot and tomato which, as someone pointed out, is pretty much authentic 80s vegetarian fare.

By the time they started to play A-ha and Julian dragged me onto the dance floor, though, I’d drunk enough to dance and dance and dance until well into the night. That was about nine o’clock.

Things were thinning out around eleven, and so with Harriet and Mark I collected my bag, and we headed up the road to G-A-Y.

It’s turning distinctly cold, and the last two mornings have started with an ice-scraping session for both myself and the car. Neither of us particularly like it.

Asked the Midnight Weatherman about our chances of snow on Christmas Eve, like they were predicting in the Standard, but he was very non-commital. Either way, though, it’ll snow and not settle, or simply be too warm for snow at all, so there’s no chance of a white Christmas.

I find the whole fact that it’s a week and a day until Christmas Day quite disturbing. It was once so far away and suddenly, without warning, it’s upon us. Testament to the fact was the magazine Christmas lunch yesterday, and the company party tomorrow.

Sandwiched in between, this evening, it was Mark’s brithday. Well, not actually his birthday per se – that’s next week – but the night in the pub to celebrate. It was like another reunion – half of PCW and a good smattering of Advisor and Dennis people. Spen got his bag stolen, and it took half an hour (literally) to get served at the bar every time someone wanted a drink, but they were the only two low points of a very fun evening.

Scott felt the need to explain in very graphic detail every aspect of his and Nat’s sex lives, until the point where he got groped by a guy at the bar (and this was not a gay pub). Apparently it’s the second time it’s happened to him in a week – the last being when he was tackle-out at a urinal.

Hmmm…

Anyway, I ended up having to run for the train, all the way along Oxford Street through the traffic (the pavements were too full) a bit like Linda Kozwolski at the end of Crocodile Dundee. I made it, barely, and then sat coughing like I had some terminal disease in a carriage full of clearly paranoid commuters.

I’d imagine they’ll spend the rest of the night popping vitamin C.

There is something distinctly unsavoury about today’s news that the Labour Party wants to welcome Ken Livingstone back into its ranks with open arms. It’s nothing to do with politics – his, the party’s, or mine – it’s the whole air of commercialism that surrounds the transaction.

Three years ago, when he was expelled from the party, Tony Blair derided his decision to run for mayor of London against the official Labour candidate and, when he won:

The prime minister, Tony Blair, urged Mr Livingstone to work with the government, but added that his views about the left-wing MP – who he had said would be a “disaster” for London – had not changed. (Source: BBC News)

Now, though, seeing that he has done a good job in the capital and is likely to win a second term as mayor in next year’s elections, with the official Labour candidate predicted on Radio 4 tonight to come in a poor fourth place, the party wants him back. This is in spite of the fact that he is still seen by many to be far further to the left than the mainstream of the party and he continues to buck the party line by campaigning against George Bush and Britain’s involvement in the ‘War on Terror’.

So should he really be a member of the Labour Party at all? It seems all the party is interested in doing is buying in a dead-cert winner and branding it all its own. The position of Mayor of London will then have the credibility of a greyhound running in colours that advertise a local used car showroom.

Christmas came a step closer today as I made (yes made) and wrote all my cards. It was both a joy and a chore, depending on whether I was swearing at the printer, or sitting in front of the telly with hot tea and toast, scoring the spines of each one and then folding them over ready for sending. Certainly the latter was very relaxing, which was just what I needed.

Last night was a busy one – and a late one – as Trevor, Jon and Paul came around for dinner at half tenish when Trevor had finished his shift. I’d invited them all around so we could watch It’s a Wonderful Life, promising it was only about 90 minutes long. As it turns out, we finished it not long before two this morning – it was considerably longer than I remembered.

I guess I’m lucky they came at all, as it was the second time we’d attempted to watch it. Last time was four or five years ago, before any of us had a proper DVD player. I’d moved my PC into the lounge and balanced the screen on top of the case. We’d all squeezed around the little 15in monitor to watch the decidedly titchy picture, until in the middle of the scene where there’s the run on the bank it all broke down. I spent the rest of the evening glossing over it while they… erm… I don’t know, actually – probably drank a healthy dose of my vodka stocks to make up for it.

Anyway, this time around it made it all the way through to the end, after which we had the inevitable post mortem, music playing, and finishing up of the wine before they headed off.

So there was no chance of an early start after that – especially as getting up meant tackling the dish-pan mountain. In all, that made for a fairly truncated day today, but at least I now feel very blithe, and I had two excellent ideas for the book. Now all I need to do is get back into the swing of writing the damned thing.