Christmas Eve

"As soon as we begin to put our thoughts into words and sentences" opined Marcel Duchamp, "Everything is deformed. Language is quite simply not well done."

Which is one point of view, I suppose, albeit a bit of a grumpy one. After all, language does work really well for lots of things: "How many sugars would you like?", for example, works perfectly, without any suggestion of the language being misshapen or not up to scratch.

And words are more than just a bunch of letters and a pronunciation; they can carry real weight when they group together to make phrases like "I think I'm pregnant" or "I love you" or "This is your captain speaking. We appear to have a problem with the landing gear."*

And then there's "How would you feel about spending Christmas Eve with my family?" Although even that is probably less alarming than getting an enthusiastic response of "That'd be great".

And so it came to pass that we spent Christmas Eve with the Minx's family and we had a warm (and welcoming) festive time. There was a minor wrapping paper related issue which resulted in the Minx having one of her presents early to free up some paper but other than that, everything was fine. Here are the rest of her presents, evidencing the wrapping skills passed down to me from my Nan.


*Which happened to me on a flight leaving Austria.