Take my good wishes anyway you choose to. If you believe in a make-believe invisible sky person, then I hope you are having a marvellous time pretending that he is the cause of your merriment, even though it’s clearly a political/corporate decision as to whether you’ve got the day off. Merry Christmas! If you’re more inclined to go with Christopher Hitchens thoughts on today, then Happy Holidays to you. Perhaps you’re more of a devotee to the John McClane style of festive fun, in which case, Yippee Ki-yay! If you’re a Mexican, then I can but apologise for being a day late with my Feliz Navidaddery.

I do enjoy a mid-week matinee in the West End. Has to be a matinee, it’s a near two hour train ride in and another two hours back again. Plays rather than musicals, although there are worthy exceptions. And the venue is as much a part of the day out as the production itself. Those rickety old London theatres take you back to a golden age before the curtain even comes up.There’s a thousand stories in the wood panelled walls themselves. Yes, yes, the toilets are cramped and stink, there’s even less leg room in the seats, your neighbours elbows will spend most of the play in your ribs and the balconies are vertigo-inducingly high.

In 2009 I watched a fabulous BBC series starring Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine. It was called Last Chance to See, a follow-up to a BBC radio series 20 years earlier when Douglas Adams (of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame) and Carwardine had sought out a number of animals teetering on the brink of extinction. The TV series was, alas, too late to see the Yangtze River Dolphin. Man had done its thing in the intervening years, and it was no more. I’m doing my own Last Chance to See…

We had low expectations of Jakarta. Expectations which were largely met. It’s a giant city crammed with millions of people but with little soul. There’s the National Monument roughly in the centre, which you can go to the top of for the worst view of Jakarta possible, because you can’t see the National Monument. In the event, it was closed on the day we strolled up. Indeed, it’s closed every Monday. The streets are interesting to walk, to see how ordinary folk live. I’m told there are lots of reasonably cool malls which is where the citizenry like to spend their free time, because there is so little else of any interest.

There’s a lot of phrases relating stress to physical weight. And I can now tell you how much weight is required for something to become a stressful event. It’s 7.1+kgs. Allow me to explain. I booked our flights to and from Indonesia with Etihad. They had two selling points that trumped all other options. Price. And a heavily subsidised 3 night stop over in Abu Dhabi on the way back - we stayed at a rather grand 5* hotel for less than half the going rate. I booked Basic Economy tickets, which comes with no checked-in luggage and a pretty miserly single 7kg cabin bag - no personal bag allowed.

My annual ‘I Win’ post has had to be adapted this year. Fortunately, the adaptation is due to it being a couple of weeks late, rather than this being the year that ‘I Lost’. I’m hoping to keep the ‘I Lost’ post at bay for many years yet. So ‘I Win’ for 2025 is ‘I Won’, where I enjoy a petty little celebration at surviving a little longer that some of history’s great and good. And not so good. There are many talented folk who died at 52 years of age.

My home town, Bournemouth, has been in the news lately. A small but noisy mob of protesters have been screaming at a pair of hotels which have been housing asylum seekers. Who knew? I had no idea that there were any asylum seekers in Bournemouth. In fact, the first I knew of it was when swaztikas and St George flags were being graffiti’ed across the town. Folk will tell you that the English flag isn’t racist. And it isn’t. But it’s hard not to notice that the folk waving the flags are the same folk painting the swaztikas.

Reform councillor Robert Bloom, who has been in his North Northamptonshire Council post for just 117 days, has resigned after a neighbour alleged he used appalling racial slurs toward her family.

If there was one thing that drove me round the bend with my Fuji X-T20, it was geo-tagging my photos. I like to see where they were taken when I look at them later in my Photos app. Just like you can when you take a photo with your iPhone. I used to use a GeoTagging app in my phone, but to say it was flaky as hell, especially when adjusting for time zones, was an understatement. The X-T50 can connect to the newer XApp on my phone for direct geotagging - I t’s too new for the X-T20.

I found myself walking through the West End in London recently. It was late evening, approaching 9pm. There were the usual thronging crowds of diners, theatre goers, sightseers, pubbers and clubbers, workers going to work, workers going home, bikers, scooterists, homeless folk and Deliverooisters. And everyone seemed very happy. Except maybe the homeless folk. But it seemed to me that everyone would soon be as miserable as the homeless folk. Because, as everyone knows, at 9pm most of those folk were going to be robbed, stabbed, kidnapped, raped and murdered.

I like this building. The orange brick tower. Specifically, the flat at the top with the larger balcony. I do love a balcony with a view. And this one has quite the view. It sits at the top of the new-ish developments at Kings Cross in London. I’d like to sit in a comfy chair on that balcony, coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other. And between sips and articles, I’d do a bit of people watching. I am nosy by nature. But having a casual gander is my limit.

I’ve been to a few ancient ruins in Mexico. If I sat down and tried to name them all, it’d take a while, I’d get well into double figures and there’d still be plenty I’d forgotten about. That’s what happens with six years of residency and two decades of visiting. Every time I go anywhere, I’ll notice a pyramid on the map and swing by. I’ve done most of the major ones. And lots of lesser known ones. Cuicuilco, a tiny site in the south of the city near the Perisur mall, was pretty niche.

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I waited years for its release. Fuji releases new models of its camera range infrequently, and I wasn’t going to trade up to a new shooter unless the spec was a substantial upgrade. The X-T50 is just that. I waited another year for prices to settle and availability to improve. Then I loaned one out and gave it a test run a few weeks ago, to make sure that it is what I want. And it was. So now I’ve bought it. After eight years of service, the X-T20 will be retired to my man-draw.