Christmas - to everyone I have said 'not as bad as I was expecting it to be'. I work myself up into a fury of self loathing around buying presents: I leave it to the last moment, I cant decide what to buy, I am buying presents for people I dont actually like, and all I really want to do is to be able to tell them I am going to stay in London with A but I'm too weak to say it.

Down in Chichester, I have a laugh with my brother who I adore because he is twin-like me; my sister's kids who are smart, funny and like being read to; and my mother, who for a short time entertains me with a funny anecdote about Aunty Hazel, her extraordinarily bastard son and her mentally deficient daughter, turns out not to be so bad after all.

Next Tuesday is my birthday, and I have none absolutely nothing to prepare for it. Last year I invited a whole bunch of people to play pool and it was good. I dont want to do the same as last year, but I cant think of another event which would combine Sunday afternoon drinking with some pleasant activity which will engage a disparate group of strangers (to eachother I mean). I did think of going to the dogs, but unfortunately its slightly too contrived for me to feel comfortable about it. I think I might just have a year off - after all, what does 46 signify? Fuck all I reckon - it doesnt resonate at all. Might as well make the most of not celebrating it - in fact that's it - I'm going to celebrate the lack of celebration, probably in a few weeks time.

Seem to have got rid of that baleful addiction to gaydar at the moment - am reading How Mumbo Jumbo conquered the World by Francis Wheen, and Spoken Here by Mark Abley. First book is perhaps a touch too polemical for my liking, but the second is shot through with the most terrible pathos: the extinction of languages is one of the worst casualties of imperialism and global capitalism. It's very well written - the writer produced feelings of deep sorrow in me for the last speakers of an aboriginal language, surrounded by younger people who had lost touch with the fluency of knowledge of one of the oldest cultural legacies in the world.

A got back from Thailand yesterday - he left here about four days after the tsunami. Incidentally I am rather aggreived that a word which I used in a short story I wrote once and had to explain to people I read the story to now has the currency of a tabloid term. Actually its got too many syllables for that, but you know what I mean. Imagine our joy last Sunday when we drove to Foulness to the pub and saw a fish and chip shop called Tsunamis, with a cute drawing of a large wave beside it. Oh for a camera at that moment. Unfortunately it isnt listed in the yellow pages, though I quite like tsunami cat grooming. That was in fact the Sunday before last - last Sunday I was up to 4 am arguing against the fact that large amounts of money donated to the appeal will be siphoned off to pay cronies of governments etc was going to bring down the capitalist system, as J seemed to believe. What touching faith in 'the rage of the little old lady who gave her pension to Oxfam'.

A. seemed to have had a good time - though I, like him, would have found the ex pat society he was forced to endure intolerable - fat, old arms dealers who have retired to Thailand to live with their girl/boy/ladyboy friend who is thirty years younger than they are. One can only celebrate the fact that the Thais screw the old bastards for every penny they've got and then piss off to the next one that comes along (which is apparently the system).