Folks,

It's exactly one year since the Embuggerance was announced and yesterday I wrote about 1,000 words for Unseen Academicals.  The reason that the book still has a long way to go (although it’s all downhill from here) is that it’s a bloody amazing day if I can get time to do more than a few hundred words; the year has been very busy, right up to knocking on the door of 10 Downing Street a couple of weeks ago, although the Prime Minister was kind enough to pour my tea for me.

There is mail and email here that I regret will never be answered.  We hope that the next four months will give me a reasonably clear run at finishing the book.  After all, all this fuss has happened because I stood up as Terry Pratchett the Writer.  Regrettably, no one would have noticed very much if I had stood up as Terry Pratchett the Gardener.  So it seems to me that I must put some time by to be the former, although I suspect I am living in hopes.  I would like to think things will quieten down a bit in the New Year. 

As some of you will already know, we had great fun recording ‘With Great Pleasure’ for BBC Radio 4 and I can now reveal that the BBC have given it a better slot of midday on Christmas Day, repeated on Boxing Day evening.  This will give it a much needed thirteen minutes extra, which means most of the stuff we recorded in Bath on November 14th will get on air.

We don’t yet know the transmission dates for the BBC2 documentary, but the neighbourhood of January 15th has been mentioned.  We’ll let you know as soon as we hear something definite.  The last piece of work I had to do for it was completed today with the mopping up of a few final voiceovers.  Incidentally, the Pratchgan, so lovingly created by so many fans this year, has found a remarkable apposite use as a reasonably efficient portable sound studio.  It is so big that we can use it to partition part of my library and has been pressed into service twice so far.  The current plan is to give it a permanent home on the second floor, but given its weight a certain amount of metalwork is required. 

I officially opened the RICE Centre in Bath on December 5th, where I and many others go for our treatment; those of you who were at Bernard’s recent bash know all about this and apart from the money raised at said bash they had a very big cheque from me as I thought this a better use of my money than Christmas cards!

Finally, I’m off to Dublin in the morning, where against all probability, Trinity College are giving me an honorary Litt.D. 

Happy Hogswatch All and may Gods Bless Us, Every One.
(Atheists may ask for the vegetarian alternative.)