New car, caviar, four star daydream

Once again, with the heroically remorseless inevitability of a Take That key change, November has crept up on me from behind like an inebriated but worryingly stealthy gibbon and I find myself staring with disturbingly erotic dread into the vast and empty chasm more commonly known as Christmas. The preparations at Castle Angstrom are underway and already I can feel the leaden corpulence of the festive season compressing what remains of my mutilated psyche to the size of a pickled walnut. Mrs Angstrom has issued firm instructions as to the nature (and indeed, the precise GPS coordinates) of her required gifts, the cost of which I can only describe as apocalyptic. All the tiny Angstroms have begun the astonishingly intricate task of piecing together their ransom notes to Santa; the constituent letters of which have been culled from my lovingly hoarded copies of Whizzer and Chips, which they "discovered" in one of the turrets after a particularly attritional chukka of Twister. And through it all, I; the great Angstrom, so admired by my innumerable and unswervingly loyal readers; put on my best shit-eating grin, gird my financial loins, and hope to God they can't smell the panic.