Every year I try to have my photo taken in front of a Christmas tree somewhere in London, for use as an e-card to the world. This one’s outside St Pancras Grand restaurant, in St Pancras station. Taken around 3pm on December 24th 2010, by my friend Ms Silke.

I couldn’t manage a smile which didn’t turn out too smirky, too smug or too camp, as in punchably camp rather than adorably camp. So I went with a mad stare instead.

Now, what does my stare look like? A terror of the future (this is my last Christmas in my 30s)? A defiant out-staring of the future, basilisk-like? Or a Jimmy Wales tactic? In banner adverts over at Wikipedia, Wiki-boss Mr Wales has been staring the world into donating money for the site.

Well, that wasn’t my intention with the photo but if it works I should really do one of my occasional rattlings of the DE tip jar. I’m currently living on less than the full dole due to my surreal/hilarious/unhappy experience with the DWP earlier this year, and I’m now having trouble affording even a hair cut, as you can see. Plus I need the encouragement to write here more often.

(rattles tip jar)

Thank you. And now, the e-card.

.

Here’s what Christmas Day 2010 looked like in Waterlow Park, London N6.

Officially it wasn’t a White Christmas, as there hadn’t been any fresh snow falling. But the snow from earlier in the week was still very much laying round and, if you will, about. Waterlow Park’s duck pond was completely frozen over, for the first time (I think) in my umpteen years of playing Santa to the waterfowl. The mallards and coots had gone, but a few moorhens were strutting about nervously on the ice. They seemed happy enough to gorge on my Proper Non-Bread Duck Food Pellets.

My friend Ms Silke, who also was spending Christmas alone in N6, brought a flask of mulled wine and some stollen cake, and we spent an entirely lovely Christmas Day lunchtime on a nearby bench.

I’d told my parents a while ago that I was looking for a letter opener, ideally vintage. This Christmas, they gave me a rather unique one as a present. It had previously belonged to my Aunt Renee, and is entirely handmade, seemingly from a piece of scrap metal welded to a large army bullet, with a British royal crest stamped on the handle.

On the blade is engraved ‘Loos. Le 25 Septembre 1915’.

The letter opener came with a WW1 medal. ‘The Great War For Civilisation 1914-1919.’ On the milled edge it says: ‘2 Lieut. L.W. Strugnell, RAF’. Mum thinks he was a friend of the family rather than an ancestor.

I’ll be putting the letter opener into active service once more.

(P.S. Re the iPhone box in the last photo. I’m flatsitting for a friend, and the box is hers. I’ve still yet to own an iPhone or iPad. I was, however, given a Kindle, which I love and which I really should write about soon.)

Thursday December 2nd 2010. London and much of the UK is currently covered in snow.  I wake up today shivering and cursing my ability to throw off heavy blankets in my sleep. Not to mention my bedsit’s lack of central heating. I have an oil-filled radiator plus a small fan heater, both of which plug into the mains, guzzling up £1 coins in the meter at a frightening rate. Still, I feel more at home in a cold Victorian bedsit in London than I would in a well-heated modern house anywhere else in England, such is my dyed-in-the-hair metropolitan blood. And I can use the heating of libraries, galleries and cafes in the daytime.

I’m convinced there’s only two ways I’d be permitted to live in any settlement outside the M25: either like the Christopher Lee character in ‘The Wicker Man’ – the eccentric yet powerful lord of the manor – or as the first sacrifice the second the crops fail. Actually, the locals probably wouldn’t wait for that.

When I visited a bookshop in St Ives last September, the woman on the till warned me – within seconds of entering and presumably with no awareness of The League Of Gentlemen –  ‘We mainly stock books for locals. Not so much for Londoners.’ I hadn’t uttered a word.

But then, as proof of my innate London-ness, one of the things I first noticed when in St Ives was that there wasn’t a single drycleaners. Plenty of art shops and art galleries, but the moment one gets a blob of acrylic on one’s cravat, it’s off to Penzance with you.

***

Yesterday morning: I surprise myself by getting up at 5am for a spot of voluntary work. I am collecting for the international HIV charity Mildmay, as my bit for World AIDS Day. I stand with a bucket and tray of red ribbons by the ticket barriers in London Bridge station, from 7am to 10.30am. Without a break, too, though that was my choice.

I also choose to never shout at passers-by, hoping my status is clear from my bucket – and the unflattering t-shirt they give me (the things I do for charity). Partly because I’m not the shouting sort, but mainly because I think people might be grateful NOT to have a street fundraiser barking at them or impeding their path on their entirely blameless journey. I can’t do ‘fun runs’, I can’t shout or collar pedestrians, but I can do is what I once did at school for charity – a sponsored silence (a sly way of keeping children quiet in class, I now realise).

So I just stand there with my bucket, careful to be visible while keeping out of people’s way, not speaking unless I’m spoken to, and armed only with a hopeful smile. It seems to work: by the time I knock off, my bucket is satisfyingly heavy with coins, and more than a few notes too.

Find out more about Mildmay and donate at www.mildmay.org