Tree

So the Christmas tree is now up and running. I put it up yesterday evening; a bit late compared to most of the neighbours, some of whom have been illuminating the night sky with their external decorations for weeks now. I always like to involve the children in these things, thinking it will make them feel Christmassy and generally cheer them up. But only my daughter was around, and she settled for sticking a few snowflakes around the new living room mirror, and then sat down again. But it's there now: looking a lot like it did last year, and the year before, and quite possibly the year before that; especially as it's the same tree, which lives in a box in the loft for most of the year. I ought to get around to getting a real tree again; but I get put off by wandering around garden centres trying to find the perfect specimen; and forcing it into the car when it doesn't particularly want to go in; and lugging it into the house, leaving a trail of needles everywhere; and then unwrapping it to find it isn't such a perfect specimen after all but is missing something on one side, and leans worryingly. I go for a fairly subtle and understated style of tree decoration, mainly because I don't have all that many decorations; but the ones I have display a certain quiet and dignified charm. As long as the cat doesn't take a shine to them, they should last many years to come.

I have my original laptop back from the repairers; which means I can type several orders of magnitude faster than on my old laptop, the one with the missing letters. I remember, as a child, a watch repairers, where we would take watches, and even clocks, to be repaired. These were clocks that worked by clockwork, and hence could be repaired by a little old man with a hammer and a screwdriver. Nowadays these things are practically disposable: it's barely worth the effort or the cost to replace the battery. And it's the same with computers: they are becoming disposable, with a year or two's shelf life at most. It seems wasteful: high-tech gluttony, gorging ourselves on far more electronic calories than we need to survive.