Happy New Year!

I really don't get this unseemly rush back to work south of the border. In Scotland, today is a bank holiday, to allow us to gently recover from our Hogmanay excess and ease ourselves into the New Year.

I'm more grateful than usual for the extra day's holiday because we've had to postpone New Year for a day because of a rather unpleasant bug which started to strike us on Sunday. Monday was not nice and it was especially annoying to have to miss seeing the New Year in with our friends. Yesterday was queasy, with underlying menace which lifted throughout the day. Today I've felt brave enough to start assembling our traditional New Year Dinner - Beef en Croute, made to a hybrid of Delia Smith and my mother's recipes, served with peas, bacon, mushrooms in cream and mash (roast potatoes for the mash refuseniks in this house) and followed much later by trifle, made again to Delia's and my mother's standards.

We spent yesterday on the sofa watching Doctor Who Christmas specials and then embarked on a 9 hour game playing Marathon. This took in several rounds of Harry Potter Cluedo - which, when we'd figured out how to set the board up and how it all worked, was very enjoyable. Then we moved on to Absolute Balderdash. This is a game when one person reads out a question, which might be some initials, or a part of a law, or a person, or a word to define, and the other players have to make up their own, completely bogus answers. The person who asks the question has to put the real answer in with the bogus offerings and players have to guess which is genuine. If I didn't know before that my husband had a weird mind and my daughter an overactive imagination, I certainly do now. That's all I'm saying. We need more people to make it better, though. Handy, then, that my sister and brother-in-law are down at the weekend.

So, to all of you reading this, a very Happy New Year to you. I hope that that all of you have peace, happiness and health for yourselves and the people you love this year.

I am going to stay in holiday mode until next week when school starts up again. It's been a lovely break and I'm not letting it go just yet.