I am ready for Christmas. At last. The final bits were bought this morning, wrapped and distributed as necessary. The fridge and freezer are full. The cards are all written (including the late ones) and posted. Now we just have to sit and wait.

Was quite proud to have done all my wrapping without using even the smallest sliver of sticky tape and managing only with paper and string. Julie Andrews would have been very proud of me. Admittedly it was yellow paper, rather than brown, but at least I made the effort.

But then I got to the bottles and, after twenty minutes of fiddling - an inelegant activity somewhere between origami and macrame - I admitted defeat and got out the dispenser to stick it all together.

Saw Lord of the Rings: Return of the King last night and have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Admittedly it is very spectacular, and clever, but I did have a feeling that I was watching it because it was one of those things I should do. That’s just how I felt when I was reading the books, too.

There were good things about it, though. I genuinely squirmed through the Shelob scenes even though I knew exactly what the outcome would be. I was very impressed by the speed at which the whole thing moved, and by the quality of most of the graphics.

However, there were also some supremely dodgy graphics. There was a point where Gandalf’s sword changes from white to black to white in a single scene. Towards the end they miss out 150 of the most important pages of the whole story, and then they don’t properly explain what the whole elf-on-boat-sailing-into-sunset thing is about. Admittedly it’s not explained in the book either, and you have to venture into the Silmarillion to get a grip on it, but it would have been a far stronger closure if they’d done that here.

On the whole, I’d give it a thumbs-up, but I’m not sad the series is now over.

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