Facebook Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I have lost track of whether I have told you that Mrs Claus has become a Facebook addict, to rival only her passion for extreme sudoku. She has many so called "friends" who exchange banal comments with frequently barbed edges. How a simple question about fudge can elicit 13 posts in as many minutes baffles me. Do they really have nothing better to do? I mean they could be making more fudge for instance. As for me, I spend my weekend doing really useful things like sitting in standing traffic for three hours to take some boxes of paperwork to a Halliwick colleague (should that correctly read an Halliwick colleague I wonder). This is a little spare time job that I tried to give up 5 years ago and by virtue of doing nothing about it for 3 years finally persuaded my colleagues that it would be worth their while to get someone else to do it for me. I don't recommend the north circular to anyone on a Saturday afternoon. Still it was good to see the new Wembley stadium for the first time.
We decided to try a different route home along the M4 to Heathrow then round the M25, longer but hopefully quicker. Jist one problem, from where we had parked the sleigh the assumption was that all traffic only wanted to go East towards the centre of London not West so the first 20 minutes was spent in the wrong direction looking for somewhere to turn round. Why don't they have roundabouts on motorways? Once we had managed to turn around however the benefits were great. There was a really angry sky to the west ranging from orange to sea green and a big wind blowing that kept the clouds moving. Much more boring when we turned east again and drove towards the dark. Still I suppose living close to the North Pole we should be used to the dark by now.
Mrs Claus had the flu jab recently. Not swine flu (I understand that is a pig of an infection to catch), just the ordinary so of course we both have streaming colds now. A jug of hot grog and resting by the fire are the usual recommended remedy but that draws her back to the dreaded Facebook. Friends, posts walls, pokes and challenges to say nothing of bejewelled gardens and private zoos. It is all a mystery to me. I understand that walls have to have posts to help them stay up but if someone writes on my wall then I call the anti graffiti squad, not say "ho-ho, how jolly" and send a bon mot back by click of mouse.
Then there is the whole thing about profile pictures. Writing this I remember that I have told you all this before because I am sure I have told you about Mrs Claus' niece who pretends to be a cat. Anyway we have a talking car and people who have photos of someone else on their profile just to confuse me. I tell you, if they want anything up their chimney this year they will have to start behaving themselves
Oh and thanks to the real (not electronic) friend who brought me a spanish omlette when the sleight got stranded the other side of the Horsehead Nebulla, otherwise known as the M25

The return of SPOT

As I think you may be aware, Mrs Claus likes the sun and warmth and as such needs some reminders of what it is like in the rest of the world away from our snowy home. With the little money that we make from bringing joy to children every year she chooses to sponsor a young lady at school in Malawi. Well, we were both invited to a prestigious event in London (that is in England for readers whose geography is a little stale)to say thank you to people who are also generous in this way and to give us some idea of the school and what Tiwongi and her friends get up to every day. We took one of Mrs Claus' helpers to keep her company on the journey and set off early from our snowy home to arrive in good time. You may not know that Mrs Claus has a fear of being underground, perhaps from being caught in a big snow drift when she was young and this has caused her much heart ache as the main means of transport in London is in sleighs that run many hundreds of feet below the surface. There are surface sleighs, which are of course red, but they are so crowded and noisy that Mrs Claus agreed to try "the Tube". Readers of a certain age will be surprised that we did not meet Jules Holland but then neither were we whisked through the wall to a sunlit Cair Paravel. This was a shame as I have only visited Narnia once and even then someone was unkind enough to point out that I only appeared in the film and was not in the original book! Hey Ho, or should that be Ho Ho!

read about Thomas and his work http://www.everychild.org.uk/content/Blogs

Where is this all leading? you might well ask
Mrs Claus was very brave and the Tube faster than we might have expected so we arrived in good time and were entertained with red wine and cheese and cheese and cheese - I was very happy. Mrs Claus' friend pointed out that there was another lady in the room who kept looking at us. Well, I am used to being looked at but this seemed more than just idle curiosity and after a while the lady came over and spoke with us. To my shame I did not at first recognise her, then I realised that the lady with whom we were speaking was none other than the first candidate for the role of Mrs Claus!!! Little did she realise then what she had let slip through her fingers, but all has worked out well, she is happily married with an elf of her own and of course Mrs Claus and I are very happy together. We spent much of the evening reliving old memories and asking afer mutual friends as well as telling our stories. We have all made promises to meet up again soon, preferably before my busy season starts, but I wonder if Mrs Claus may find a way to prevent it happening

As some of you will know Mrs Claus and I now have our own pages on Facebook and we have been looking up other members of the family. The profile pictures people use really are very odd somtimes. Mrs Claus has a niece who looks very much like a cat, whilst her oldest nephew would appear to be a 60's rebel with a surf board.
We of course remain incognito on our pages making only passing reference to our lifetime's work and achievements
We get less hits than you might expect but then as someone commented to me the other day, it is not cool to have an uncle on Facebook