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I managed to surprise my mother today. I told her one of my sisters was visiting me later in the year. We are going to do a joint Chanukah and I get Christmas with friends, so it looks as if it will be just about the best a festive season can be. Normally I plan a ton of work to keep busy while everyone else is holidaying but now I wonder if I bring all my deadlines forward I can actually get a few days off.

For everyone local who is wondering if it is worth avoiding me during my normal seasonal grump, my sister has promised me a giant slab of Alpha chocolate, which I intend to make into fairies and other speculative fictional shapes. So if you avoid me, you avoid the best kosher chocolate Australia can produce. If she brings me enough chocolate I might see my way to sending care packages out to friends not in Canberra. If she can't bring it, I will still do the care packages, but when I have managed to get to Melbourne - so send me snail mail addresses if you want chocolates. Kosher. Dairy-free. Divinely delectable and deliriously-shaped. I can even manage Hebrew names in chocolate, which is kind of worrying.

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Something truly interesting just fell into my inbox. I now possess the text of the judicial decision on Lord Haw Haw. If he hadn't got a British passport, he would not have been convicted for treason, it looks like. The moral of the story is never to claim a country that is not truly your own, especially one you are going to work against during a major war. And especially if you pick the losing side.

There is a glorious send-up of the whole Haw Haw thing in Barthelme's World War II Arthurian comedy.

And I keep thinking that Haw Haw and PG Wodehouse must have met somewhere, sometime, and wondered what on *earth* they would have said to each other.