Merry Christmas everyone!!! (Okay, actually it's January already, but I've got some catching up on myself to do, so just bear with me darlings.)

Christmas Day was upon us. The weather was a little brighter but still not tropical. All the better for enjoying vast quantities of hot winter food then! But first came the present opening ceremony, which was similar to the one followed when I was a child. All the guests (Noel's son Mike and daughter Lyn, with her daughter Sarah, were there as well as A&B&I) took seats in the lounge, and presents were brought from under the tree by Santa's Little Helper, a role taken in turns. My best gift was from Amanda & Bernard: a concrete paving slab! What better travel aid for someone with as empty a rucksack as mine?

The Christmas dinner was delicious: lamb accompanied by a roast vegetable salad and some other veggies, topped off with a raspberry pavlova, some home-made ice cream and a plum pudding. And plenty of liquid refreshments all afternoon, which saw us through chatting, playing petanque, chatting some more in louder voices, and finally retiring indoors to chat very loudly and somewhat incoherently until bedtime. Don't ask me what we were chatting about!

Boxing Day was a complete change: summer had arrived! I felt a little under the weather (ironically) but decided the fresh air would do me good, so I scooped up my book (Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, which is a bit hard going but all right) and headed into the garden, striking a prostrate pose on the trampoline. Before long I could feel the effects of the hot sun on my skin, and applied some sun screen - that forgotten substance, lying hidden in the bottom of my toiletry bag since Hong Kong. The endless blue of the sky was broken but fitfully by wisps of evanescent cloud that melted away visibly as they scurried out to sea. Now and then a zephyr of warm breeze would tousle my hair, but on the whole the air was still. Soon it was too hot to stay outdoors, so we all moved inside and took to reading our books or the newspaper lounging over sofas and easy chairs.

Bernard & Amanda prepared a fresh pizza for our al fresco dinner that evening, consisting of roast veggies & lamb and seeming to me Lebanese. This and the fruit salad that followed were very much in keeping with the day's heat. As evening drew in, we settled down to some more relaxed conversation and drinkies.

Monday morning, though as sunny as yesterday, had a fresher bite to it. The wind was up and had turned to the east once more. We decided to head out to Sumner to have a picnic on the beach there, but when we got there the beach proved too bracing for comfort so we instead ate on a grassy area next to a children's playground. This being the first of two public holidays (seeing as 25th & 26th were a weekend), we weren't the only people to be out and about. To escape the icy blasts, we headed after lunch to Corsair Bay, a small cove south of Lyttleton that is more sheltered.

Once again, we were beaten to it by hordes of people, and it felt more like Mallorca than Canterbury, but somehow I didn't mind the crush. Instead I mused on the fact that these days you see more and more people of a certain corpulence (myself included) that you might in days of yore not have expected to show themselves in swimwear - at least, not in public. I think this is a healthy development. Not that people are getting fatter, but that fat people are getting more confident.

In the evening A&B&I drove to visit Amanda's friends Melanie & Paul. Their two-year-old daughter Monica is very lively! She will have lots of fun playing with the sibling that Melanie is about to give birth to in the next week or so. After Monica had gone to bed, we grown-ups ate astonishingly large quantities of delicious Vietnamese food that we had bought in a nearby restaurant in Riccarton. It was bloody good! After a few hours of conversation, Vietnam being one of its topics (Amanda is the only one of us who hasn't been there yet) we left them and went home.

Tuesday was more cloudy than fine. After another lazy morning A&B&I drove out to the Tegel Chicken Farm, where Amanda's friends Sue & Vern live (Vern is the manager there, and gets to live in a house on site). We had lunch and beers there, along with Sue's sister Jill. After a lovely few hours chatting there, we came home and, in response to our bloated stomachs, decided to go for a walk in a nearby nature reserve. I felt so much better after walking off some of this week's excess, but to be honest I would have to walk to Timbuktu and back to burn off all the chocolate, cakes and booze I've enjoyed since I got here!

In the evening A&B&I met Jayne & her boyfriend Barry for dinner at an Indian restaurant. It was great food, with the one drawback that it left us all feeling a shade gassy. Called Two Fat Indians, it is modelled quite deliberately on English curry houses rather than trying to be Indian, to the extent of suggesting not only which bread might go best with each dish but also which beer! We had a lovely time and came home feeling contented.

The next day was a quiet one, spent reading and relaxing - what a surprise! The day's excitement came in the evening when A&B&I went to the cinema to watch The Incredibles. What a fantastic film! So funny, and so well-drawn. I absolutely loved it and strongly recommend everyone to go and see it. It's great! Our cinema-going was rounded off with a delicious pizza feast in a Kiwi chain called Spagalimi's. The pizzas were surprisingly good, as was the coffee.