Holidays whilst still at work. Christmas holly-days.

Tying gold ribbons around winter tree-imprinted books with cheesy Christmas tunes on a CD that cost £2 in the background and looking out across mildly snowy London. St Paul's all misty like in Mary Poppins, 'feed the birds, tuppence a bag'.

Christmas decorations up at Yasar Halim on my stocking-up-on-supplies Saturday morning. Do you want tinsel with your tahinli? Baubles with your borek?

Big house in Clerkenwell, camping out, pretending to be grown-ups. Actually buying the Observer. Terribly, terribly middle-class jaunt to Waitrose, half-price bubbly, puff pastry for a pie we make for supper, vegetables that look like spring in a saucepan, wine time at just after 3pm (is the yardarm over the whatsit?). HIGH LIFE.

Reading on the sofas about the Mitfords and how I could stay where they lived and breathed and endured the childhood I inhaled from Nancy's novels.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/dec/05/mitfords-chatsworth-derbyshire.

They may have been everything I turn my nose up at - awful snobs, hunters, the odd fascist, I could go on... - but, oh, romantic countryside lives and jolly adventures. And who am I to talk, residing in Clerkenwell and shopping in Waitrose. I need a tulle drop-waist dress and chaise longue and cigarette holder, and cut-glass vowels to make my wit that bit sharper as I chat and lounge and wait for a sherry.