The goose is getting fat.

I'm not looking forward to Christmas this year again as I can't buy presents for family and feel bad accepting gifts from them, but they don't seem to understand how that feels.

I wish it was all over and everything was back to normal, but it will get worse before it gets better.

And now there's the black cloud of Gran being in hospital to live with. She's had a long life, but that's not the point when it comes to the crunch. Grandad has been dead since 1986 - I don't see her much these days, but she never mentions him at all and the older I get, the more I feel and look like him. Our characteristics / personalities are very alike. It's strange as I used to feel closer to my fathers family in a way, but maybe that was because we lived in the same street when I was growing up and we seemed the same social class, but I aspired to a better class which my mothers parents seemed to have - a more affluent part of town etc. They actually ate cucumber sandwiches and drank tea, although professionally they were only a bus driver and school dinnerlady; nothing wrong there, but they lived a different type of life than you might imagine.