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Christmas arrived on my desk today with a very heavy thud. A big Marks and Spencer hamper from Hi-Grade, After Shock from Adobe and a very large David Bailey photo book from Lexmark. That’s obviously what happens when you say it’s a quiet year for PR presents. I had to split the hamper up and bring most of it home this evening. The rest, I’ll pick up tomorrow before heading on to ITN.

At last, it’s the end of term. My last day in the office this year. Everyone had a touch of the silly season, and Mark ended up spending the afternoon dressed in the Christmas beads.

There was a semi-regular fire drill scheduled for eleven, giving the whole day even more of an end-of-school feel, but we sneaked off to Carlton Coffee House at five to so we wouldn’t have to stand out in the cold. We justified it by taking our spreadsheets with us and calling it an editorial meeting. Only trouble was, I had a coffee immediately on top of the large tea I’d been drinking at my desk and by the time we left I had coffee overload and was shaking like an old man with DTs. It was Mark’s last day in the office, too, and it’s his birthday on Saturday, so we gave him the clock and clangers fridge magnets we’d bought him just before we left. That went smoothly enough. The other birthday presentation, at the opposite end of the day… didn’t.

We have a spreadsheet containing everyone’s birthdays, and we had Chris down as 29th December, so did the customary collection and sent around a card for signing. I passed it to Dylan so he could make the presentation.

How glad am I that I did?

Apparently it wasn’t his birthday at all, so it’s not surprising he was a bit shocked to see us all advancing on him in a less than subtle pincer movement from behind the water cooler. Half way through the little presentation he interrupted to explain that not only had we got the day wrong (27th rather than 29th), we’d also got completely the wrong month. We should have been doing it in January.

Anyhow, he accepted the gifts and said he’d open them when the right time came around.

My phone started to ring as soon as I got back to my desk. The guy at the other end introduced himself as an old friend of my dad, now living on Coco Beach, Florida. Apparently they used to work together in the 80s and he’s just received dad’s Christmas card… but lost his address.

He remembered something about me working for PCW, so looked it up through Google and got my number from the site.

Very random. Anyway, I gave him dad’s address, as well as mine and said it was probably best to send the card to me so I could pass it on - he arrives for a few days on Saturday. Now that I think about it, though, there’s no way a Christmas card will make it from Coco Beach to here by the time he goes back so I’ll have to post it on anyway.

How random is that, though?

I went to Sainsbury on the way home and got the ingredients to bake Christmas biscuits for the rest of the team on the show tomorrow. Doubled the quantities and made rather too many. Still, they’ll keep. I suspect I’ll be eating a lot of them over Christmas.

I downloaded my email as they cooled on a wire rack and there was an email from my dad’s friend. Lots of ego massage - ‘I never realised that you had become so famous’. Not in the least bit true, but always nice to hear.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2001 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Journal, Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.