Are you sure it's Christmas again? It doesn't seem like a year ago since we put up our last Christmas page. Well no sense in burying our heads in the sand, the calendar doesn't lie and so we proudly bring you this years Christmas page which much like last years we'll cobble together as we go along.

Rather than spend the best part of a week painstakingly creating a three dimensional computer modelled piece of yuletide fireside imagery as I did last year, I thought I would just raid the younger members of staff's Santa letters.

The pics were taken from their second attempts, the first which were vetoed by Wifey for being nothing more than a list of demands. The second attempts were much nicer, thanking Santa for all his efforts last year and full of 'please', 'may I' and 'thank you'.

As you may have seen in Wifey's bit we are off cycle camping to Suffolk and with such a challenging expedition a great deal of pre-planning and preparation is required. Specifically how are we going to make the tea and what are we having with it? Well the tea makings have been brought out of mothballs and refitted and are all set to go. In scenes redolent of the re-commissioning of the green goddesses, I've managed to get my 25 year meths powered camping stove back to its former glory using a drill, some pliers, some emery cloth a vice and new lid. We will bring you a special report on our mobile tea makings upon our return.

As for the fruitcake, we have allocated the bottom quarter of one cycle pannier to carrying it, such is its strategic importance. The cake above is a Guinness cake which I made last week, however we will be taking with us our own recipe fruitcake which has been painstakingly developed over the last year or so by Wifey and myself and subjected to extensive field trials. For details on how you could make your own NCOTAASD fruitcake see this detailed intelligence briefing (..alright, recipe), which outlines plans for a boiled fruitcake that takes much less than 45 minutes to prepare, and has in no way been 'sexed-up', apart from some gratuious images of cherries.