Ho ho ho

Blimey I'm still tired. I seem to have gone through Christmas in a bit of a daze. But managed to somehow pick up the smallest digital video camera in the world (ha, if you keep saying you want the same thing over and over again, eventually it starts to sink in), some excellent purple pyjamas (not sure if I mentioned it but I have a bit of a thing about purple), a couple of books, a couple of cds, and some wicked cool black weather gloves which bring me a lot closer to looking like a ninja.

Teamed with my brother's girlfriend's new balaclava (I think it's for snowboarding rather than robbing banks) I could commit all manner of heinous crimes and no-one know *insert image of frangelita putting evilly gloved hands together*

I do have a more sombre thing to add. As some of you may be aware, I work for a local newspaper in Suffolk - close enough to Ipswich that I hear much more than I want to about the "Suffolk Strangler" but not so close that I have to actually write about it.

Anyway, fairly frequently we get press releases through from various police forces telling us about various people who have gone missing. Most of the time, they have just gone off without telling anyone and they're found fairly quickly - sometimes even between when we go to press and when the paper comes out. So when a press release came in the Friday before Christmas about a woman who had gone missing, I didn't think too much of it. There were contact details for the woman's sister so I called her up and chatted to her about her sister.

Unfortunately, this story was never going to have a happy ending. The woman was an insulin dependent diabetic who was being treated for depression. All pharmacies and doctor's surgeries had been informed and not seen her so she had been most likely off her medication for over a week. Her sister confided in me that there was really no chance of finding her alive at this point.

Christmas was good for me this year - I was surrounded by people I loved in a warm, loving atmosphere, fed lots of good food and showered with material things. But all through Christmas I could feel the shadow of this woman's tragic story hanging over me.

However much anyone's holidays sucked this year, think about her and her family. And about those poor girls in Ipswich whose lives took off in a downward spiral they could never get out of. And all the other girls out there who need our help and our pity more than our disgust or mistrust, however bad some of their decisions may have been.

No-one deserves such terrible things to happen to them. Spare a thought for those whose Christmases were indescribably awful and who cannot hope for a better new year.