This post brought to you by half a bottle of wine and far too much food

I owe people betas and emails and responses, but I have been eaten alive by Christmas. This is me poking my head above the digestive juices on my way down, pancreas-ward. Spleen-ward? Pre-ileum, certainly.

My family has descended upon me, and it's all fun so far - the first two days usually are. It may be a different story after my brother arrives, and by boxing day I'll be sick to death of them. But right now? Fun!

I wanted to share the British tradition of the pantomime with you guys. We went to the panto today, which is a totally normal Christmas thing to me, but according to various people it's incomprehensible and freakish to the rest of the world. What could be more fun than going to the theatre, watching singing, dancing, cross-dressing silliness and heckling the cast? The one we've been to the past few years doesn't have the semi-famous and their career-promotion - it's a purely amateur thing and much better for it. This year was (nominally) Aladdin, and it sold out in November because the writer is a legend in these parts. My group of family and friends caused the panto to overrun by almost an hour today with all the ad-libbing they had to do. They wondered aloud where the princess was as a cue for him/her to come on stage, but we yelled the traditional, 'He's behind you!!' and they looked over at us, like 'oh, it's going to be you lot today, eh?' They did the 'oh, really!? Let me look!' thing, complete with band accompaniment, even though the scene was in a little little set and the only place she could've been was like, in the oven). The tenor - who I quite fancy and who I will always think of as Buttons from a few years back - got the giggles, and the ugly sisters Widow Twanky and the genie diverged significantly (and hilariously) from any script they might have once had, to the point that the princess (less comically talented) was rather confused and my mother (my mother!) cried laughing. Plus, the Widow Twanky had an astonishing range (6? 7?) of garish, wonderful costumes with skirt hoops/bells/sparkles/clown feet/frilly knickers/'microwave safe' labels/5 foot wide hip flares. Buttons accidentally really slapped an ugly sister, the sorcerer couldn't hypnotise Buttons without getting wittily interrupted by a kid a few rows behind us, and a penguin lost a shoe; but everyone hit every note, nobody misdelivered any jokes, everyone danced in step. PANTOS ARE AWESOME. And I don't care how tacky and ridiculous they are.

Is it just us? Sod cricket, Wimbledon and the monarchy - someone tell me pantos have spread!

So, dodificus , naye , deltacephei ... I haven't checked my flist lately and have barely been reading email. I am not dead. I have a spare couple of hours on Wednesday, which I intend to use catching up.

dodificus ! It doesn't work on my ipod atm. Format suggestions?!?