I've sorted out my baubles. I've downsized the tree this year.

My decorations are now in the downstairs room, waiting to be put on display tomorrow.

My tree is an artificial one I bought for my grandmother in her nursing home. We decorated it together and lay down on the bed to look at all the sparkling lights. She didn't know by then that it was Christmas but she liked the effect of the lights. As she went fast downhill around New Year and died that first week, the tree was still up.

It's in a box, wrapped in a silk sheet, still decorated as it was, waiting to be brought out again this year. The decorations are a mix of all different colours, themes, periods which have been gathered, gifted, and found since forever. Chanel No.5 powder has to be purchased for a dusting of snow effect. Once I've got round to that, it'll go up.

My mothers is up - as ever it goes up on my birthday. My son was round there to decorate it and for the first time was shown the pictures of my own very first Christmas...

The decorations are huge (and include half life sized nativity people) and the tree likewise so tall (municipally so in fact) that various pieces of it are all over the living room - you can barely make us all out in the photos, so hidden are we.

This was due to my mother having taken my brother and me to New York. My father having not done anything and realizing we were due to return on Christmas Eve, spent the night of the 23rd driving out to a town in Kent to strip their prize winning square of the entirety of their festive decorations.

My sons only real memory of his grandfather is of them both laughing as he stood on a windowsill while my father encouraged him to aim his p*ss at the people at the bus stop downstairs. I suppose that's rather lovely in its own way.

Once again it's the joyous day of anti-Christmas!

When we brutally seize children's toys and take them away to the North Pole.

That all seems like a different lifetime.

I see the exponential caseloads in Arizona, Texas, Florida - all the crazy nutjob places that didn't shut down properly. Today here, a state of emergency declared on Bournemouth beach - apparently half a million people were on it at one point. Sunburn will be the least of those imbeciles problems.

I am almost desperate to have my eyebrows dyed, my eyelashes dyed and permed, and my all new hairstyle tidied up, dyed, and treated - but I'll resist from doing so for at least a month after I can do so. See how its looking like panning out first.

Hopefully after a long hot summer and a short but gloriously crisp autumn, it'll snow like it hasn't in years just in time for a cosy December and January lockdown.

Spent the last quarter of an hour following up that Bournemouth story. On one level I'm angry with the people involved, on another I feel sorry for them, on a third I'm almost envious, it must be nice to live a carefree life where you just drive down to Bournemouth during a raging pandemic, not considering whether your actions might have any consequences at all.

I haven't been more than 5 miles from my front door since all this started, never mind driving halfway across the country.

Nor me. I concur with your feelings about it. It must be thoroughly enjoyable to live entirely in your own world, where the potential effects of your choices on others not only have no weight, but aren't even weighed up at all.

Perhaps there's a potential new reality series to be made - Banged Up In Bomo.

I haz an Advent calendar, well prepared me!

Only a month and a bit to go till I get to feast on the cheap chocolatey goodness.