Post-Christmas and New Year's post.

• Christmas - luncheon with extended family, Perth branch. Acquire CD burner, and many books and CDs amongst other gifts. Give away a few nice ones too.


• Christmas night - picnic with Max, Point Walter, get given rather amazing blue-and-white mountain bike with front suspension and twenty-one (count 'em) gears. Cue much gawking and goggling, and feeling slightly sick for not being nicer to surprisingly awesome friends. Spend beautiful evening, follow with impromptu midnight rental of Amelie.


• Boxing Day - eight and a half hours in car with family on road to Esperance. Read entire Agatha Christie novel aloud between us. Do cryptic crossword. Engage in typical family japes. Arrive in Esperance, discover they've laid in a three-cinema megaplex specifically for my visit, and somehow acquire two cancelled tickets to The Two Towers. Stupidly ignore consequences of seeing this film without Max, and go anyway, to ultimate eternal regret. Think film is 'not bad' (typically my opinion is somewhat deflated compared to run-of-mill viewpoint).


• Post-Christmas Interregnum - spent largely on world's most perfect beaches at Cape Le Grand National Park, and playing devilishly competitive games of Balderdash against family. Also devoted considerable time to thrashing my little brother at Worms 2 on my mum's old laptop. Have amazingly relaxing time. This place is enough to make one convert to some religion or other.


• New Year's Eve - boring. Spent watching The Player with father and sister. Almost forget to see in midnight.


• New Year's Day - ten hours in coach on way back from Esperance. Total boredom (including viewings of Twins (the stupid Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito comedy, and some crappy outdoor Alaskan movie costarring Charlton Heston as a poacher), punctuated only by two-hour conversation with Esperance farmer's wife about the future of her three children.

More to come, perhaps.