h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. It is the year's deep midnight and it is the day's, as Donne said of St Lucy's day (who "scarce seven hours herself unmasks".) Actually, unbeknown to John Donne (rave on, John Donne) Lucy - the one that I know - hasn't been "unmasking" herself at all, but has been very sensibly curled up in front of the fire with Freddie, across the valley at Berry Brow.

So, this is the week when we have nearly reached the turning point - the "still point of the turning world", as Eliot put it. In the words of the song "I noticed tonight that the world had been turning". The ascent towards Christmas has been like toiling up a rocky pass between two mountains, and finally we have reached that flat shoulder at the top of the climb where you can look down in to the valley beyond, the valley called 2005. At the top of the pass is an inn called Christmas, where we will spend a few days resting and carousing and where we hope there will be room for everyone, before we have to press on.

Russell has been keeping a low profile this week, indeed all of the cats have. The tide of cold air that seeps through the house has left them stranded high and dry in odd places where there are isolated pockets of heat - under the heated towl rail in the bathroom, in a box of gone away envelopes in the office and, most usually, curled up in the armchairs nearest the kitchen stove. Russell had a bad "do" during the week, when the paroxsyms of his coughing and heaving were giving cause for concern, but he calmed down again and went to sleep in the chair, on top of my fleece. Like Mohammed with the tabby cat, I didn't have the heart to move him.

Tig has spent her time dozing with her nose in her tail, waiting, like the rest of us. Do they know it's Christmas? Probably not, their lives are like a permanent Christmas anyway.

From my vantage point at the top of this imaginary Christmas pass, I can look both forwards and backwards, backwards over the past week and forwards into next year. The past week has actually had little to comment it. At one point I was in a meeting during which someone broke off to take a mobile phone call from a graphic designer in Hungary, called Attilla (I kid you not) which was mainly about inflatable guitars. Debbie's Christmas "do" on Tuesday night was the usual volatile mix of alcohol and social workers, which inevitably continued into early Wednesday morning. While driving into town to pick her up, a group of drunken young male revellers - or, as I prefer to call them, prats in Santa hats, spilled into the road in front of me, trying to stop me and flag me down under the mistaken assumption that I was a taxi. I am ashamed to say that it was only the thought of the paperwork, and how bad prison food can be, that made me finally decide to swerve and miss them.

Arriving at the joint just as they were tipping out, I found little to report, except that someone had apparently tried to pick up Gail, one of Debbie's co-workers, with the immortal chat-up line "Scuse me luv, are you normal?" Ah, Huddersfield, Verona of the North.

Then on Thursday the windscreen wipers packed up on the car, which meant much chuffing about with batteries and fuses, only to discover the motor has burnt itself out. This is probably my punishment from on high for having bad thoughts about winging drunken yobs the night before. On my way to the garage, I drove past a house which had outside it an 8 foot high illuminated inflatable Homer Simpson in a Santa suit. Please, Lord, I have suffered enough.

One way or another, Santa Claus has been present in the background a lot this week. We watched the programme on TV on Saturday about the real St Nicholas. His bones were stolen from the Turkish shrine which contained them, by the fishermen of the Italian port of Bari, where most of them now lie (give or take the odd jawbone and bit of the true cross) in the basilica there, where every year the priests draw off a mysterious liquid (known as "manna" that seeps from them. Urgh.) The programme used reconstructive computer technology to build up a 3-D picture of what he must have looked like, based on a detailed survey done when the tomb was last opened in 1953. They even lowered a camera on a stick down a crevice into the tomb, to see if he was still there.

Debbie then pointed out to me that it can't be the real St Nicholas, because "where are the bones of all the reindeer?" This led us on to a detailed discussion of the names of the reindeer, and the following exhaustive canonical list:

Rudolph, Dasher, Prancer, Donner, Kebab, Blitzen, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. It's like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, you can only ever remember three of them at any given time.

Sunday I spent fixing Debbie's mother's emails, and proving conclusively that it was working by sending her a test email which popped up straight away on her machine a mile away across the valley. I phoned her to see if she had got it. "Yes, well, I seem to be getting yours anyway. At least if you've fixed it so I can get local emails, that's better than nothing." I suggested she send her friend in Canada an email asking her to reply as a test, so we could see how far "local" extended!

Then in the afternoon, I ferried Deb to Meadowhall. I didn't particularly want to go, as I thought I had already seen enough of the commercial bits of Christmas, but I did venture into Past Times, which had a large display of statues of the Buddha, under a notice which proclaimed "The perfect gift for Christmas".
Do they know it's Christmas time at all.

I have been waiting for the turning point of the year, for Christmas with all its miracles, for what seems like such a long time, that now it's finally in sight I feel rather numb. The world seems drab, dreary and full of bad things at large. Gyres run on - and what rough beast, its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? The chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, (probably what the Buddha will be getting for Christmas, in a special Past Times edition) talks of the passes between the mountains being sealed at the solstices, so that no one could travel. Back again to the idea of the point of stillness.

So maybe what I need to do this week (and this may only work for me, I am not saying it's OK for you too) is to concentrate on the idea of the stillness. Forget the inflatable guitars and the mobile phones and the windscreen wipers and the Homer Simpsons and the karaoke Moose (rational and irrational) and sit still and enjoy the rest while I can.

Listening for the quiet voice that says it's finally, OK to celebrate.