Merry Christmas, everybody...

Looking out of my window, the apt song for today would seem to be "I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas". It's mild but rainy.

The oddest Christmas I ever had was spent in shorts and T-shirt in sweltering tropical heat without the benefit of AC, frantically trying to copy-edit a book which claimed to be a dictionary of idiomatic English, but which had quite clearly been written by someone totally unfamiliar with the English language.

It contained examples of 'idiomatic English' such as:

"World War I broke down shortly afterwards"

and

"Excuse me, can you tell me where I can move the bowels?"

I should have just let it stand as an inadvertent comic masterpiece, I suppose.