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“There it is again.”
“What? What am I looking for?” Melchior was upset, he had just been having a particularly nice dream about a hand-maiden that he had in his employ when Steve had woken him. He spoke again, he put an upset tone into his voice, “What, am, I, looking, for?”
“A star,” said Steve.

That was it for Melchior. “I know it’s a star you blithering idiot. If you wake me up in the middle of the night, thrust a telescope in my hand and tell me to look at the sky I’m not going to think it’s a mongoose am I?”
“Well…”
“Am I?”
“It could have been a comet.” These words had not come from the cowering Steve but had come in fact from behind Melichor completely. It was Balthazar.

“Stop messing around with that poor boy and concentrate on the matter at hand.” Balthazar swooped into the tower. Steve thanked his lucky stars and then stopped when he realised how much trouble that pun would get him in from Melichor. By this point Balthazar had glid* his way across the room to the observation point. With a swift flick of the wrist his telescopic telescope extended to it’s full length. He looked through it and announced “Steve is right. A star is born. We shall follow it. It is moving to it’s appointed place. When it reaches there a child will be born. That child will be the king of kings.”

Melichor on hearing this drew himself up and said, “this truly is a great day. I am with you Balthazar. We shall go and worship this infant child.”

Steve slowly put his hand up. “What is it now?” asked Balthazar.

“Well I’ve been making some calculations and it turns out that in fact stars are balls of fire that are millions of miles away. Even the closest one takes four to get its light here. So if we go and anoint some child that’s born there when the star gets to its resting point we’ll have the wrong one. We’ll have to work out how far away it is and then find who was born there that long ago. And it could be thousands of years ago.”

“Shut up Steve,” pointed out Melichor.
“Well said Melichor,” added Balthazar, “lets go and find Gaspar”.
“Yes, I always thought he had a better name anyway.”

*To quote Eddie Izzard, “you try and decline the verb to glide”.

Two men are walking slowly across a bridge in London. They have just been for a lunch at the company they used to work at. The company that was their s until they were retired.

They had a great time at the dinner. They caught up with the old codgers, and told the youngsters what hey should be doing.

“You know what?” said one to the other.
“What?”
“Christmas makes me remember how much fun it was to be a kid. I mean, if I had been a kid I wouldn’t let you get away with saying ‘what’.”
“What? I mean, how do you mean?”
“Well we used to have this thing of if anyone said ‘what’ you said ‘chicken butt’.”
“Oh.”
“It’s strange, the way these things occur to you.”
“In what way?”
“Well. A million people have said ‘what’ to me since I was a child but that’s the first time I’ve thought about that since I was a youth.”
“But that’s what memory is like. When you think of something things that are near them in your memory become more available.”
“That’s true I suppose. But you know what I’ve been thinking?”
“What?”
“Chicken butt. No I’ll let that one slide. What I was going to say was that now when we look back we remember things with rose coloured glasses. We remember life as though it was in the movies. Hitchcock said ‘movies are life with the boring bits cut out’ and he was right except memory is the same.”

“And my question,” he went on, “is why don’t we think about it at the time? We love life as it was. But we don’t remember to love it as it’s going by.”

Jack was wedged between the vacuum cleaner and the coats. The nozzle of the hose was sticking into his arm, but he felt safe. It was dark under the stairs, but not the scary kind there wasn’t enough space for shadows. He was depressed, what did Tom know about Father Christmas anyway?

Jack decided there was an awful lot that Tom didn’t know about. Like him thinking that his parents couldn’t see Jack. Tom could see Jack couldn’t he? So why should his parents be any different? Why didn’t Tom believe that his parents and Jack had been playing hide and seek for years and that to reveal himself now would be a disaster?

“So,” Jack thought, “Now Tom doesn’t believe in Father Christmas”. Next he won’t believe in imaginary friends! This might be a problem in the long run but now Jack was more worried about Christmas. What if Tom was right, and that Father Christmas was just Tom’s parents?

The other day Tom had said, “If my parents have never seen you, then you won’t get any presents. You should talk to them”. But Jack knew the truth of the situation, the game of hide and seek he was playing with the parents could only end if they found him, he couldn’t just give himself up. Well, he could, but Tom’s parents would loose all respect for him and they certainly wouldn’t buy him any presents then. Jack hoped that Tom’s parents still remembered that they were playing the game with him.

Jack’s only hope was that Tom was wrong about Father Christmas. Jack thought about crying but he didn’t, because he knew that nobody would see his tears anyway.

Jenna was not happy. She was not happy because two girls who she had thought liked her had not given her a Christmas card even though they had spare ones on their desks and she walked past there three times.

Jenna was not happy because Wahkeem had been mean about her name. Which wasn’t even fair because he was the one with the silly name. Having “Wahkeem Marine” as a name was a sign that your parents didn’t really like you that much – Jenna was pretty sure of that. If they had even bothered to consult a dictionary and spell it Joaquin like everyone else it might have seemed less like they were joking. So when he had run down the corridor in break shouting out “Jenna Jenna smells like henna” she had become mad. When all she had been able to come back with was “Well at least my name’s spelt right”. She had suddenly become decidedly not happy.

But most of all she was not happy because of something she had heard in the toilets. She had heard two older girls talking. One of them had been really excited about what Santa might bring her for Christmas. And the other girl had corrected her saying “you mean your parents.” After a few seconds of explanation it had all been explained. The older girl thought Santa didn’t exist. But the thing that was making Jenna not happy was that she was starting to believe it too.

The way Jenna saw it the alternative explanation seemed to make a lot more sense. Which, she wondered, was more likely? That an overweight man visited every child on exactly one night? Or that parents really gave the presents? Jenna knew what Uncle Occam would say.

Finally while thinking about all of this and looking thoroughly not happy all the while her mother looked in the rear view mirror to check on her.

“Are you alright back there? You don’t look very happy about something.”
“No. I’m not happy. I’m not happy about three things.”

Jenna was just about to go on and explain what the three things were but just then her mother started slowing down the car. So instead she said “Why are we slowing down?”
“Well there’s a car just by the side of the road there which looks broken down. There’s no toher traffic around so I thought I’d better stop and check.”
“Oh,” said Jenna, “right.”

Once the car was parked Jenna’s mum got out and went to talk to the driver. Jenna couldn’t see if it was anyone she knew because they were standing around the front of the car and the bonnet was up so that they could look at the engine.

She couldn’t see if it was someone she knew. But she could hear if it was someone she knew. And just as she thought of that she heard the deep rumbling voice of a large man. But the voice had something else, something light and twinkling on top just so the rumbling wouldn’t be so scary. Jenna only knew one person with a voice like that. But she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions so she hopped out of the car and went to investigate. She slowly and carefully walked to the front of the car and when she got there she slowly and carefully peered around the corner.

Black boots. He had black boots! But so do lots of people Jenna thought.

Red trousers. But lots of people wear red trousers at Christmas time.

A big silver buckle. Jenna decided with that that this looking slowly business wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She looked up and she saw Father Christmas.

“Santa!” she yelled.

Santa saw her and gave her a hug.

The rest of the conversation passed in a dream. And suddenly Jenna and her mother were back in their car driving home. But this time when Jenna’s mum looked in the rear view mirror she could see Jenna had on the biggest grin of them all – the one she kept for very special occasions.

“It was a funny thing running into Santa like that wasn’t it.”
Jenna could only nod.
“He told me he was just off to the Mall.”
“He was probably,” Jenna said, “doing his Christmas shopping.”
“Yes,” said Jenna’s mum, “he probably was.”

Jenna thought to herself that this year Santa might need an extra mince pie. Even if she had only doubted him for a second, he might need one extra mince pie per second of doubt she thought. Although it wasn’t total doubt so maybe she’d try and get low fat mince pies.

Day 5

Five nanobots went in and, yesterday, three days later three emerged tired and hungry with many stories to tell.

However none of them are related to why I’m rubbish at remembering to put articles up on Mondays.

Today while having breakfast Captain Lawrence Oates fell out of my nose and into my cereal.

This weeks articles are dedicated to Lawrence, the bravest nicest nanobot I ever had the pleasure to meet. I hope he’s gone to the great tympanic membrane in the sky.