Another peaceful start to the day. This is unprecedented. It’s amazing what serenity a man can harvest when he bolts his door, deactivates his phone and decides to stop giving a fuck about every single living, breathing creature on the surface of the earth for a few days. It’s not all selfishness. Some of it’s self-protection. My heart’s been thumping like a back paw on a cat’s itchy back of late, and Herr Claus, my beloved Margaret, has ordered me to take it easy. Under pain of something unpleasant and as-of-yet unspecified. She’s hinted that much worse things than heart attacks can happen to a man. I’m hoping she isn’t referring to her stovies. Now that is a threat worth listening to. I’d rather eat uranium-garnished pig-poo whilst enduring twelve simultaneous heart attacks and a bonus rectal prolapse than suffer another single spoonful of that crunchy, former-flesh-mess she calls ‘a Tuesday Treat’. Silent ‘H’.

At least she’s good at cakes. You can tell that from my waistline. Mixed messages are being sent here, I fear.

‘Eat,’ she keeps saying, ‘A cake never hurt anybody.’

(‘Oh, hello, Dianne Beatties. Mrs Claus, have you met Dianne Beatties? Dianne Beatties, Mrs Claus, Mrs Claus, Dianne Beatties. Oh, hang on, there’s Sean Coronary and his wife.’)

Even though it was morning, I closed the heavy curtains in the living room and lay back in my armchair like I was a marshmallow bobbing in warm chocolate. Margaret lit the fire. which sent faint orange flickers dancing onto the wall. To delight the nostrils, the scent of freshly baked cake wafted in through the kitchen door, and the only sounds lulling between the four walls were the soft crackling-spit of the fire, and the gentle and steady tick-tocking of the clock. Heaven. My younger self would be appalled by this sentiment, but I wouldn’t trade in this level of comfort even for a shot at a queue-based blow-job from a platoon of the dirtiest, most wet-boobed and slutty war whores seen this side of Paisley.  Even if they were all thus guaranteed to be more sexually depraved than a drugged-up and recently evacuated Kerry Katona.

In any case, there’s very little life in Frank Junior these days. A lungless lady would have more luck inflating a wet balloon.

Anyway, enough cock-talk. I’m Santa Claus, for goodness sake!

In the afternoon I went off to greet Ronald. His private jet is actually shaped like the McDonald’s seagull motif. Well, I know it’s an ‘m’, or a set of golden arches to use the marketing parlance, but when that jet comes flying hard towards the ice, all curved, hump-backed and seagull-y, every single fish in the Arctic shits itself. And what a noise it makes as it approaches; what power it blasts from its engines. It whipped the snow off the ice like dandruff in a hurricane. A giant ‘m’ landing in your back garden, like the first vessel in the Alphabet Army’s invasion force.

I must admit it was good to see Ronald… well, initially… but more on that in the next journal entry. Something’s wrong with the clown. Bad wrong.