*I'm not really a hermit at all. I am still getting up, still getting dressed, still working, still mothering. I'm just hiding my fear and pain behind a flippant lip and fictitious laziness. I'm pretending everything is tickety-boo-hunky-dory and that any reluctance to do anything at the moment is my new found commitment to hermitude. It's not. I am not very well and am struggling to deal with sickness and the daily demands placed on my shoulders. Can you smell the self-pity, it has a distinct whiff of ashtray and gherkin?

This is still one of the funniest things I have seen all year. Says a lot about the quality of my life and my mental state. Sad that.

The Christmas season is definitely upon us. 

I know this because my child is frantically 'dusting for Jesus' and I got to beat her with the big twigs kindly left by the Pan European Child Whipper on Tuesday morning (here). I am also attending more corporate events than you can shake a lukewarm canape at, whilst wading through stupid volumes of work that are being rudely dumped at my door as other people clear their inboxes.

It's difficult to muster up the energy for Christmas, which is very unlike me. Today I took a day off from work and my corporate rigor mortis smile, to spend the day giving good Christmas to my daughter.

Today's highlights:

1. Feeding the hens spaghetti. This may be the funniest thing I have seen all year.
2. Embarrassing my 7 year old by singing Joy to the World on the streets of Manchester, whilst wearing a 'way weird' bobble hat. A parenting triumph.
3. Going to Forsyth's (a Manchester institution: here) to buy more piano music and listening to my daughter play her recent exam piece on a grand piano.
4. Gluhwein, lebkuchen, bratwurst and schnitzel. With the German Markets in town, Manchester smells deliciously like my childhood. 
5. Feet up, thick socks, fire.

It's that time of year again, when four generations of the family's females gather around a 90 year old mixing bowl, to make our Christmas cakes and puddings.

Four faces, the same but for the depth of laughing lines, simultaneously frown in concentration and light up in loving laughter. Fingers that steal glace cherries are playfully slapped, and sherry sneakily shared.

We stir east to west in age order, to seal in our Christmas wishes. As always, I hope that this four will never change. That we'll never grow older. Knowing - as I peer across the age old bowl at the female faces I know like my own - that yet another year has disappeared. 

It doesn't matter though. For, when I catch a glimpse of my daughter stool-highered and leaning into the mix, I see myself years past gazing up at faces long gone. The official family start to Christmas will never end; faces will fade and new eager hands will be added to the continuous depth of my great-grandmother's mixing bowl. 

It's special. It's family. It's Christmas.

Protect it by wrapping securely in brown paper and serve with lashings of sherry. Just don't forget to enjoy it. Ever. 

This week is all about work and ill-health.

I'm huddled over a laptop in my piccalilli stained pyjamas with hair that would make Krusty the Clown jealous, perma-snarling at anyone who comes within a 5 metre radius. Without The Internets (that means you), by now I would have pulled my frazzled, tiny mind out of my left nostril.

This week The Internets have been lovely. These my favourites:

1.   Letters of Note: letter from a 20 year old Madonna to a film-maker. I love Madonna, and have recently taken to trapping my child in the bath with her songs blaring. It's an important part of her education she feels the love and learns all the words to Holiday. It is not abuse. It should be on the curriculum.

This letter is pure Madonna magic:

'By the time I was in the fifth grade, I knew I either wanted to be a nun or a movie star. 9 months in a convent cured me of the first disease'. 

And:

'I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan where I began my career in petulance and precociousness.'

If you don't read Letters of Note (here) - which you obviously do, because who doesn't - do so immediately. Guaranteed brilliance. 

2. Nobody can have missed the death of Jimmy Savile. Whatever you think of him - and I do concede that displaying his body at the Queen's Hotel in Leeds is more than a little ghoulish - he was a big part of my childhood.

And I'm from Leeds.

And as a teenager I worked for his bestmate as a gulag inmate of his, not so, chi-chi hair salon.

And he and I share a love of Scarborough.

(This is about as far as I can take our mutual similarities, before admitting to an early 1990s love of flamable tracksuit material, gangster gold and cuban cigars. Need I go on?) 

It's in my blood, and no doubt in yours; I watched and wanted to be on Jim'll Fix It with weekly jealous fervour. Read Dom Lawson’s account of Jim fix-in it (here). It made me tearily nostalgic.

3. I've watched The Sound of Music for the seventy billionth time with my child.

For years I’ve baffled over other people’s love for the curtain wearing nun. Really? Come on, if you had to choose (I mean had to, like your life depended on it), it’s always the Baroness, right?

She has Christopher Plummer under her thumb, looks like a dream and has the good plan of sending the seven god-awful, do-re-mi kids to boarding school. I’d send them in a brown paper package, tied up with string, but that’s just me. I never know when to stop.  

Some things never change. Whatever. Did you not see it’s been a bad week?

I often spend Mondays feeling over-awed. Usually because I've spent the morning shouting at a 7 year old as I frantically febreze her uniform and kick her out of the door with a slice of burnt toast clutched in her clammy hand. The rest of Monday is normally spent sitting slack jawed and hunched over my laptop, as I desperately try to remember my name, what I do for a living and why I always leave the most mathematically complicated of tasks until last minute.

Today's awe was completely different. I spent the afternoon being celebrated as one of 400 Women of the Year at a hotel on Park Lane. In my real life apparently I am amazing - or so Sandy Toksvig kept telling me - and worthy of champagne and five star luncheons. And as lovely as this was, I still can't shake the feeling that someone, somewhere has made a mistake.

Perhaps somewhere out there is another, more altruistic, Elsie who got up and saved the world seven times before breakfast. This Sliding Doors Elsie probably found a cure for cancer, whilst I greedily ate her four course lunch. Tonight, as I make my way north after spending an evening buying unnecessaries in the V&A, the other Elsie is sheltering the homeless and singlehandedly fighting global warming. Poor other Elsie will remain an unsung hero (until next year at least), because Sheila in admin put the wrong address on the envelope.

This is not false modesty. It is very easy to believe that there has been some awful error, as I spent most of the day gazing open mouthed at my known heroines (Maureen Lipman, Shirley Williams, Shami Chakrabarti, Nawar El Saadawi, Camila Batmanghelidjh) and being humbled by the achievements and self-sacrifice of many of the other women I had never heard of before.

It's difficult not to be overcome with admiration when you talk to 106 year old Hetty Bower, a veteran anti-war campaigner, originally horrified into pacifism by the state of soldiers returning from the Somme and who can still be found protesting in Trafalgar Square. Or Naveeda Ikram, the first female British Muslim Lord Mayor (at 37 she presides over the council in Bradford). Or Karen Sorab who fought to set up the Rainbow special needs school in Wandsworth and the BeyondAutism charity to fill much needed gaps in community education. Or the seven serving military medics (known as the Sister Act) who fight, on a daily basis, to save and rebuild the lives of wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan.

These women are truly amazing and I am utterly humbled and very, very proud to be included. Wow.

Skippy had her eye's tested yesterday. She's been complaining recently that the world looks spotty. 

It went something like this:

Optician: Right Skippy, can you explain to me what these spots you see look like and when you see them?

 Skippy: Well, yes. They look like spots. Everything I look at all the time is very dotty.

 Optician: Ok. Is there anything else you can tell me? Is it more dotty in the morning, or maybe are far away things more spotty?

Skippy: Well, there is something else - Mummy I've never told you this before - but sometimes when I look at my hand I can SEE RIGHT THROUGH IT. I'm not sure if I'm imagining it though...

Optician (coughing slightly): I think it's pretty safe to say that's in your imagination Skippy, unless you have superpowers, of course.

In my next life, can I just have a normal child, please?

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I mock, but I do so from the comfortable position

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