Every year for the past umpteen years it has been a sort of pre-Christmas traditionish that Merriol buys me a 'Christmas Album'. It started when I found and bought, much to Merriol's bafflement, a copy of The Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You, a true classic of high camp. I can't remember the order in which they arrived but over the years I have been given Christmas albums by Elvis, Sinatra, Boney M, Bing Crosby, James Brown ("Get on down, like a snow machine!"), The Partridge Family, Gene Autry, etc. etc. This year in a spectacular piece of barrel bottom scraping I was today presented with... Joe Longthorne's Christmas album.


Oh God!


On the upside today I ordered our new computer. I spent ages on the phone to a nice bloke at Dell (Delhi?) and ended up spending 30% over our budget - but I got something with lots of big numbers in it, numbers which mean nothing to me but sounded good and will, I hope, mean the thing goes faster than the cobbled together collection of hubs, caddies, and wires that I'm typing this on. (The second hard drive is held in place with a bent paperclip). Fingers crossed. This will be the first machine I have owned that doesn't have a 3.5" floppy drive. but it does have eight USB holes which means I can stop having hubs plugged into hubs which will mean the desk will be a little less knee deep in cables.