I am very much looking forward to my holiday and putting together my New Year's newsletter made me realise just how much I am going to need it. It really is going to be full on til September at least. So hopefully two weeks on a beach in Mauritius will be some compensation both for the stressful and packed autumn I have just had and the stressful and packed spring and summer to come.

And I have an important blog decision to make in the next couple of days. Am I going to take the first holiday from Warming Up for over seven years and not keep you updated for the next couple of weeks or am I going to plough onwards as I have through all other holidays since November 2002?

I was quite determined to give the blog a well deserved rest, but now, as I get closer to the cut off point I feel less sure. I am only about 1000 entries from a 10 year daily blog! And if I even have a brief hiatus then I can no longer make the impressive and tragic claim to have never missed a day.

I will be taking my computer and might just find that if the hotel has wi-fi that it is too hard to resist the temptation to continue, but all senses of perspective and propriety makes me think I should not. Yet I know that holiday time often leads to time to think and interesting entries and certainly I found the holiday blogs very useful when I wrote "How Not To Grow Up". But there's nothing to stop me writing stuff down in a notebook and not sharing it with you idiots.

I still haven't decided what I am going to do, but weirdly I think I am going to feel like a bit of a failure whichever course of action I take.

And what if I stop and never start again?

Ah the jeopardy.

We popped down to the Westfield this evening to go to the supermarket and found the place crammed to capacity with bargain hunters looking for deals in the pre-VAT rise sales. After the excesses of Christmas it just seemed wrong to see so many people trying to splurge more money on bargains. But I got sucked into it all and bought some DVDs to add to the pile that I haven't yet watched. When the Westfield is packed then it is hard not to conclude that all human beings are scum who should be wiped off the face of the earth. But I have never liked crowds and so am not looking forward to the experience of going to the airport in this post cock-bomber world.

We watched two of the DVDs as we ate our massive, but healthy dinner (my diet seems to be back on track for the moment at least and I consumed an aggregate of 1800 calories today - but it's going to take a couple of months of that before my big, fat belly has shrunk to 2008 proportions). "Moon" was absolutely excellent and well worth a look and we also saw "Ghost World" which had less ghosts in it than you might expect and which I quite enjoyed, although I am not sure how much fun it is reliving those awful teenage years where you felt superior to everyone and everything whilst you were actually just a selfish dick. Steve Buscemi was great in it though and he hasn't always been so in some of his more recent work.

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