I’ve had two very productive days, and it feels quite good. Yesterday afternoon, after a morning spent trying – in vain – to coax some life into the weather station’s Internet connection, I sat down and started to write. Old fashioned writing: pen in hand, paper on lap. It was something I’d wanted to do since the last day of the working year and, with all the fun of Christmas behind me, it felt good.

I didn’t pick up my half-finished book manuscript; instead, I just thought about my characters: who they were, what they did, what they were like, and I started to describe them, returning to them after an absence of almost two years and doing my best to get to know them again.

It’s been quite an eye-opener, and today’s installment, which ran to 11 handwritten sides of A4, has proved to me that my secondary and tertiary characters are far more interesting than my lead. They have more history, they lived through more exciting times, there is more in their past that affects their present and impacts on the futures of the other people in the book. It’s made me think again, quite seriously, about the direction my existing 114,000 words have so far taken.

Hmmm.

Well, I have a long train journey ahead of me tomorrow, which gives plenty of time for thinking. In fact, it could give a lot more than I’d expected, as the snow is still lingering, despite the promises of warmer fronts moving in, and nasty, unwelcome rain on the way. I rode the bus into town this morning, and had the place almost to myself. The streets were buried under a soft inch of pure white drift, and it all looked very nice.

I’d much rather have that than rain, any day.

They say the weather is something of a British obsession, and having watched the last couple of days’ worth of news bulletins, I can believe it.

You see, there’s been some snow. Not much – just about half an inch around here – but it’s enough to have the police warning us all not to leave our homes unless it is absolutely necessary and the rail companies cancelling trains. Even the Channel Tunnel has been closed, and that runs under ground, well out of the reach of the snow.

Honestly, you’d think we were living through The Day After Tomorrow, but as Paul, Dad and I went out for a walk across the valley this morning shortly before he headed off home it was all already starting to melt, and when we walked through patches of sun it was actually warm.

How ironic it is, then, that the weather station has chosen now to break down. All the dials are reading just fine on the base station, but the software that updates all the details on the web is refusing to play along, pretending it’s blind to everything and complaining that the batteries in all the sensors are flat.

Hmmm.

I was intending to spend this afternoon working on the book, but instead I’ve spend it fiddling with the weather, to no avail.

Ho-hum. I just hope the trains start running again before the weekend. Our tickets to Edinburgh are sitting in my top drawer, and I very much hope we still get to use them.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve done the Maldon Mud Race now.

Well, I say ‘done’, but of course I mean ‘watched’. It was a first for Sal, Dan and dad, though. Dad arrived from the frozen north at about 10, having set off at half five this morning, so we motored around to mum’s and picked up Sal and Dan, then scooted across to Maldon through a light shower of rain, bought our tickets and stood on the quayside.

It was so cold. The wind skimmed up the estuary, skipping across the frigid water, making us all glad of the gloves and scarves and thick coats in which we’d wrapped ourselves. We hugged polystyrene cups of tea and looked down on the competitors, some barely dressed in anything, down on the mud below.

The race itself takes barely any time at all; the leader has run down one bank, across the river, up and along the opposite bank and then back through the water and up the nearest side again to the freezing showers syphoned straight out of the boating lake in about four minutes flat. The stragglers, though, found themselves wading through the waist-deep churned-up mud for 40 minutes or more, freezing themselves and getting caked in thick, sticky mud.

It must start out as a great joke, messing around at the back and dawdling, but you’ll soon regret it. One woman was being sucked down into the mud and had to be levered out by the sub-aqua club. Other people were struggling so much they flopped down on their backs and pushed themselves along with their legs, sliding along the slimy surface.

I had packed us a picnic, but we ended up parking so far away that by the time we got back to the car it was better to drive home and eat it there, where we sat around the fire warming up. In fact, eating was pretty much the theme of the afternoon. We had home made biscuits and cups of tea and opened our presents and then while they watched films I made a huge fish pie and a lemon meringue pie that was too fluffy to keep itself upright. It tasked fine – it just didn’t look so good.

It was a mighty fine Boxing Day, though, and I’m sure it did us good to get out of the house this morning with something proper to do, rather than just drifting around the streets mid-afternoon looking for fresh air as an excuse to walk off yet another large meal.

It’s been a good Christmas this year.

Christmas Day at last, and the weather is fantastic. The sky is brilliant clear blue, the sun is streaming in through the front windows so brightly that we

Tonight it’s the Dennis Party. The theme is James Bond.

Hmmm… I didn’t really want to go in the tux, despite the fact it’s still hanging up behind my desk from last week’s awards. Chris of the Phin has painted his index finger gold, though, and Chris of the Brennan is wearing a bowler hat.

So, I headed out at lunchtime to buy a shirt so I at least looked tidy with my jeans, and after an unsuccessful fiddle with the racks in Urban Outfitters, found myself in Dickens and Jones, which is closing after Christmas.

Oh. My.

The basement is packed with rack upon rack of knocked-down clothes.

Now I’ve always been proud of the fact I’ve never bought a suit. That’s one of the perks of doing this job. But when you see Christian Dior suits reduced from

All. Going. To. Die!

It was cold today, but not unbearable, and so I went out with the camera after lunch, out across the fields past the mill to the nature reserve on the opposite side of the valley. The sky was clear and blue and the sun was low, casting long shadows. Behind the hedges, where it had been shady all day, the grass and churned up mud were still crispy and hard. The river had a frozen crust that was strong enough not to crack when I threw stones down from the bridge.

And yet the countryside was teeming with wildlife. The squirrels were busily digging up food, and the hedges were fully of chattering birds. One robin spent about ten minutes fluttering around me as I stood by a fence. It was almost as though it was posing for photos.

After a long session of preening itself it leaps and, with a cheerful squeal, flew away.

After that, the bouncing bunnies didn’t seem quite so cute as they usually did.

We went to the cinema last night, for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and came home disappointed.

I’d read good things about it, but few of them were warranted. It’s very slow, and while it would have seemed impressed before Lord of the Rings, in these post-Jackson days it’s just a bit… well, ho-hum.

Worse, there are some very obvious blue-screen moment, where the actors are standing in front of the kind of poorly colour-synced, almost defocused backdrop we would have forgiven in the sixties, but can’t excuse today.

It’s almost like the studio saw the success of the Middle Earth trilogy, and the Harry Potter films and realised it was missing out. Panicing, it reached for the closest thing to hand, and mixed the two for what should really have been a sure-fire hit: a kids’ film set in a mythical land.

And I’m sure with a little bit more work they could have pulled it off. Except that the performances are lacklustre and I really didn’t care about the main characters, and whether they lived or died. The talking animals were no great cop, and even Aslan was one-dimensional.

Hmmm. Well, it’s the first of seven films, I guess, and I was disappointed by the first Potter film, too, although that franchise has improved over the years and the latest is very good, by all accounts.

Perhaps we should chalk up the first instalment of the Narnia series to experience, then, and see what they come up with next time around.

Richard came in to the office last night with the single he’s got out for Christmas. He’s reviving Herr Flick and recorded Rock Around Ze Clock with Helga (Kim Hartman), so he’d brought in some pictures from back when he was in Allo Allo for the publicity.

We all sat around listening to both sides (if you can have such a thing on a CD) and munching on Mars bars before heading off to last night’s party down by Trafalgar Square. It was a miserably cold walk, and as I’d still not been home for a couple of days I didn’t have particularly warm clothes with me, so was glad when we arrived, to be greeted by posh Cosmopolitans with blackberries perched on the rim.

From our office to there, though, is so interesting you spend half your time pausing to look at things, which probably accounted for the cold feelings. As we cut through Chinatown someone had thrown open the doors of a van, from the back of which a big projector was showing some kind of film on a wall high up on a building. I don’t know whether it was political, but it had attracted a small crowd, which huddled together to keep warm, their heads thrown back so they could look up at the pictures.

It was a fantastic night, and again one of those parties where everyone seems to turn out (including, inevitably, the lunch bunch). I was intending to stay for only one or two, as I’d been close to falling asleep before we left the office, but I still ended up staying and chatting and drinking and eating until the last train home. I don’t think there was a single magazine I didn’t get to talk to someone from, and even Ursula was there; we’ve not seen each other in almost a year.

Many too many pink cocktails.

Tonight, then, out with Kathryn and Emilie Ems. We went to Cantaloupe over near Liverpool Street. It was full of people having their Christmas parties and getting very very drunk. The toilets were a long walk off down some precarious stairs. The doors were marked ‘Men’, ‘Ladies’, ‘Nothing to see here’ and ‘Nor here’, but I think the humour was lost on the blearly-eyed beer monsters who couldn’t even hit the urinals fro six inches away. One particularly pitiful example had put his drink down on top of the soap dispenser, but couldn’t coordinate his hands and his eyes enough to be able to pick it up again, and was yelling for his long-gone friend to come back and help him.

But the friend never arrived.

It was the last night out of a busy Christmas week, but little compared to next week. S_____ on Monday, H___ on Tuesday, Dennis on Wednesday and MacUser on Friday. I only need to find one more party to plug the gap on Thursday and it’s a full house.

I am so very, very tired. Last night was the PC Pro Awards. Much fun. Snazzy hotel. Excellent food. Too much to drink. so much, in fact, that when I woke up this morning my tongue was black and I don’t know why. Really, really black, and black saliva and a very nasty taste.

Hmmm… Could have been the sub-four hours of sleep I managed to get before being woken up by what sounded like lots of trolleys rolling around the corridor outside the hotel room where I was staying. That was about 7h15, and I’d not got to bed until 3h30, so I was in no mood for being awake.

The night itself, though, was great. Back at the Park Lane Hotel, a familiar venue, in the underground ballroom that looks like the dining room of the Titanic and was used by Churchill during the war as a centre of operations.

J’ai pass