Two days to go

Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Tralalalala la la la la
Let us all be frightfully jolly
Tralalalala la la la la

Or not, if you’d rather not. As Eeyore said in a different context: Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush. We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.

In eight days time Other Men's Flowers (the blog, not Wavell's anthology) will be four years old, and now contains more than one third as many words as War and Peace. There has been much controversy over the relative merits of the two works, but actually they have very little in common: there is practically no reference to the retreat from Moscow in OMF (though there are two fascinating notes on Napoleon’s hat), and no-one is going to film it with either Henry Fonda or Anthony Hopkins, because Pierre Bezukhov hardly figures in it at all. On the other hand, W&P is not made up of over 700 posts and does not contain 1100 comments, 360 pictures and 670 hyperlinks. Above all, Other Men's Flowers reproduces no less than SEVEN cartoons by James Thurber and THERE ARE NONE in Tolstoy’s great novel. I think the conclusion is obvious.

The day after tomorrow is the First Day of Christmas. For that day and every day until Epiphany I have sought the help of John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich CVO, an English historian, travel writer and television personality known as John Julius Norwich: posts on those days will be entirely his work.

So until 7th January 2008, toodle-pip and A Happy New Year to everyone .