Well it's Saturday again. I got a Christmas card from Mark this morning. I should maybe have written some of my own. I'll write some very soon.

Miss Dawson is coming to stay today. She's on the way. I hope the car makes it ok, I think there might well be lots of traffic to try the cooling system. Here at HQ it's been raining, but it has recently stopped. It is very windy however.

About 5 years ago, well in February 1999, I went on a weekend away in Bermondsey with the church youth group. One of the girls, who went to Dean Close, brought a Russian friend known as 'Tats', which to my ears is a complete butchering of the name Tatiana. She gave me a book in Russian by Chekhov. This wasn't any old brown hardback book of Chekhov though. Far from it. This is because some comedian had got hold of a set of coloured biros and written jokes in the blank pages at the back. So I thought I'd read them this morning, and I came dangerously close to understanding some of them. I learnt a long time ago not to read too much into Russian jokes. Once you've understood the words, you can assume you have understood the joke. Very rarely do you need to read between the lines, and very often the jokes are more a set of factual sentences rather than anything to shove in a Christmas cracker.

Anyway, must get my room sorted out a bit. Bye for now.