I had a very lazy December, and I really couldn't be bothered with cooking. This meant I was mainly eating meat, because you don't need to do much that's culinary to prepare it. You just shove it in the oven or under the grill, set the timer and go back to looking for websites about giant mechanical riding spiders, which is a lot more interesting if you ask me.

The vegetarians won't be very impressed, but few among you will be surprised. I wouldn't even bother mentioning it, except that I weighed myself shortly before Christmas, and I've lost half a stone. it decided me. I'm going on the Atkins.

At first I thought the Atkins was a diet in which you ate things which ought to make you fat, called it a Diet with a capital D and mysteriously became thinner. It turns out that people on the Atkins actually eat a lot less, even though they haven't been told to, because of the amount of protein they eat. Protein plays a large role in satisfying the appetite, so high protein foods suppress the appetite more effectively than other foods.

Unfortunately I'm still allowed vegetables, twenty four years of vegetarianism not apparently being deemed sufficient, but foods with lots of carbohydrates are out, especially at first. This means no bread, which is going to be a bit weird. It also means no beans, rice or potatoes.

It transpires that I have to distinguish between good carbs and bad carbs, which seems to be another way of saying good and bad fats. Trans fat is bad, but poly and mono unsaturated fats are OK, and so apparently are saturated fats. Trans fat comes mainly in processed foods, whereas saturated fat is in meat and dairy products. This appears to mean that cheese is OK. I had been planning to cut down on cheese, but if Doctor Atkins insists it would be rude to demur.

High protein foods in general are the mainstay, so that means lots of meat, fish and eggs. And tofu, which I'm still a fan of. As a result, I'm off sweets and chocs, and I don't actually mind this because I'm still experiencing meat as a treat.

That's an idea, actually. I think I'll use rhymes as a motivating device. So, meat is a treat, fish is a fine dish, cheese is much better than peas, and Atkins begs that I eat more eggs.

Incidentally, did you know that the word diet originally meant a public meeting? In 1521 Martin Luther was interrogated for months at a meeting organised by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in the German town of Worms, and historians refer to this event as the Diet of Worms. I think I'll stick to the Atkins, personally. Worms are full of germs, and only fit for pachyderms.

Merry Christmas everybody!

I was going to do a long piece about all the Christian myths surrounding Christmas generally, but Kristi Harrison has done it for us on Cracked. Instead, here's a short retread of something I did a few years ago about Santa Claus.

The legend of Santa Claus can be traced back hundreds of years to a monk named St. Nicholas. It is believed that Nicholas was born sometime around 280 A.D. in Patara, near Myra in modern-day Turkey. This is during the later period of the Roman Empire, but before the Empire split into East and West.

Incidentally, St George also came from Turkey, about a century later. This is really useful for annoying pin-headed nationalists, and should be mentioned whenever anyone starts going on about how no-one celebrates St George's Day because of political correctness. It's also worth adding that his mother was Palestinian. Honestly, it really annoys them.

St Nicholas was venerated in early Christian legend for saving sailors from storms, protecting children, and giving generous gifts to the poor. The Christian figure of Saint Nicholas replaced or incorporated various pagan gift-giving gods from Rome or central Europe.

So the next time someone mentions the true spirit of Christmas, tell them it's raki, washed down with Coke.

Actually, the true spirit of Christmas is Sainsbury's Irish Cream. And none of these facts seem to obstruct the onward march of religion a jot. Now they've miniaturised the Bible, and printed it on a chip the size of a pin head. Very clever, but not as clever as not doing.

We're halfway through the season, and City are still third. West Brom are only ahead of us on goal difference, and Watford by two points. Don't believe me? Here's the table. I don't blame you for being doubting Thomases, partly because Thomas is fairly much the only character in the whole Messianic farce that deserves any respect at all, but mainly because I'm struggling to believe it myself.

It's amazing to think that at Christmas two seasons ago we were bottom of League 1. For the benefit of my American readers, and a disappointingly large percentage of my English ones, the top division (the MLB equivalent) is called the Premiership, the next division down is called the Championship and the next two below that are called League 1 and League 2. After a decade spent mainly in League 1, City were promoted to the Championship last spring, and this year are challenging to go up to the Premiership.

Again, I should probably explain. Every May the top three teams in each league go up to the league above, to be replaced by the bottom three from that league. For City, it's as if we were the Springfield Isotopes, hoping to get into the same league as the Yankees or the Red Sox. This presents the top teams with a level of risk the money men in US sport would never accept, which is why it doesn't happen to the Red Sox, or more pertinently the Devil Rays, but in Europe it's literally the rule of the game.

Not that we'd survive for long in the cut-throat world of the Premiership. We just don't have the Premiership virtues. We arse around on the edge of the opponent's penalty area too much. Our players never seem to get round to crossing or shooting. How we ever actually score is something of a mystery. Also, the midfielders never seem to see the winger, alone on the touchline and nearer to us in the stand than they are to any defender.

The Championship virtues we have in spades. We work hard, we come out fighting at the beginning of every game and we tend to hold leads once we've got them. We have two big tall forwards and the ability to hoof it up to them, and they know how to occupy the exact space where the ball will fall, then hold it up while everyone else charges into the opponent's half of the pitch.

That's the point where we struggle, though. We don't have the killer instinct. The ball that cuts an acute angle exactly between the two covering defenders is never the ball that's played. Worse, though, we don't know what to do with the split second advantage.

When Premiership players get a split second advantage, they pounce on it like funnel web spiders, and the ball is in the back of the net before you can say Titus Bramble what a donkey. With our players, the first thing they do is stop and think I've got a split second advantage, what am I going to do with it? and by then it's already gone.

Still, all credit to them for their achievement. And all credit to me. My football team are doing well, and that reflects well on me in some undefined yet tangible way. Yes it does.

You pick yourself up, and then they just knock you back down again.

In my reasons to be cheerful, I said that the tedious bit before Christmas was nearly over. Later that same day I went to order some food from Tesco. A reasonable enough activity, you might have thought, but no. All delivery slots completely booked up until December 27.

Of course, there's going to be a higher demand at Christmas time, but - and this is the real kicker, as I'm sure you'll agree - I wasn't ordering Christmas food. I was ordering everyday food, for the next few days. Shouldn't there be a special Internet queue for people like me?

When I say people like me, I don't mean bearded, obsessive compulsive self-indulgers, although many would agree that we should have our own queue. I mean people who want normal food. There's a special queue for people who want five items or less. Why shouldn't there be one for people who want bacon and beans, but no cranberry sauce?

In the absence of any foresight on the part of our beloved food suppliers, it's down the bleak backstreets of Barton Hill to physical Sainsbury's. Where Christmas is in full swing. You can see how much people love it by the cheerful smiles on their faces. Actually I did see one family having the whale of a time, but they were all on the large side. For those of us with padding Sainsbury's is like an Aladdin's cave, all sparkly and sugar coated. To think I was once worried I might lose my figure. Not only is it all still there, I've actually managed to add to it.

I do get carried away in food shops, and I think I may have overdone it a bit on the vegetables. I'm still not quite sure what I'm going to do with an entire green pepper, and some mushrooms. The good news is I managed to get a few treats as well. The checkout girl managed not to actively laugh at my consumer choices, but it was a close run thing.

But I bought nothing with any seasonal decoration on it at all. So my initial premise, of not shopping for Christmas, has been met in full. I didn't even get any Bailey's. It turns out Sainsbury's own brand Irish cream is just as nice, for half the price. I could have got two bottles, and still felt virtuous. It's making it harder to type though. If I finish this glass too quickly, my spelling will start to deteriforatgc, and hten I mitgh just tail off in teh midlle of

Yes alright, I may have gone slightly over the top yesterday. Here, as a counter balance, are some reasons to be cheerful.

1. Bristol City. Third in the Championship in our promotion season, we already have just about enough points not to be relegated. Oh ineffable joy, joy beyond all other joys. Lee Trundle says City's success is no shock. He should see the expression on our faces.
2. Cardiff lose Thompson card appeal. On Saturday, I saw quite the most vicious premeditated thuggery I've ever seen on a football pitch, as their striker Steve Thompson ran straight through our keeper, Adriano Basso. It was a foul by a Scot on a Brazilian, but that didn't stop the City fans from launching into a pro-English and anti-Welsh tirade. The BBC report describe him as 'lunging from behind' at Basso, but there was nothing homoerotic about the actual event, which was just brutal. Sometimes a red card really isn't enough.
3. Fabio Capello. See the nation rise from its moping couch as the despair ebbs away, to be replaced by a highly contingent suspension of disbelief, like a divorcee dragging herself out to a singles lounge bar on a Saturday night. We've been let down so often before, but maybe this time we won't get a lizard.
4. Virgin Media customers lost their broadband for a while. It didn't happen to me, because I wasn't able to move, so I wasn't with Virgin Media. Oh, the schadenfreude.
5. Christmas. The tedious bit before Christmas is nearly gone. On Christmas Day, I get fed by friends. On Boxing Day, I get fed again, by different friends. On the 30th, my sister feeds me. Three Christmas dinners, and I won't have to peel a sprout. Next year it's my turn again, but next year is next year.
6. Internet shopping. I never have to do my Christmas shopping in town again.
7. The Internet generally. What the hell did I used to do with myself?
8. Science. It still works, bitches.
9. Solstice. A couple of days, then the sun starts coming back. We've only done a third of the cold, but we've done half the dark. This is where we do actually have it worse than the Americans. At 51º 27` north, we're on the same latitude as Fort Rupert on the Hudson Bay, further north than Kiev. It gets dark at four o'clock now, ten o'clock in June. Ten o'clock here we come.

Am I forgiven now? Why not express your forgiveness by feeding me another Christmas dinner? I don't think three is quite enough.

It's complicated enough when you buy your first house. I'm now trying to buy a flat, sort out a mortgage, arrange to rent out my house, change the mortgage on my house to buy-to-let, and arrange to have enough work to pay for it all. It's all in hand, and I really believe it's all going to happen, but it's like there's a keyboard in my brain that controls my emotions, and the R, A, G and E keys are stuck down. Everything is getting on my tits right now.

Here, then, is a list of all the people who can just fuck off. It's not exhaustive. How could it be?

1. People who say they're going to buy your house, then pull out at the last minute, when you've already booked the cable people to come in and you could have been in there by now, watching Liverpool v Man Utd in comfort.
2. Fucking Man Utd.
3. Governments who constantly introduce policies to rationalise the process of house buying, then pull out at the last minute.
4. People who pull out at the last minute generally. It's so - anti-climactic.
5. Whoever invented Christmas. Actually, there's a story there, which I'll be giving you nearer the time. Clue: it wasn't Jesus.
6. Whoever invented Christmas cards.
7. Whoever invented Christmas presents.
8. People who make the outside of their flats or houses look like a theme park for the age of neon. Excuse me, your homes do have an inside, why not concentrate on that? Do you want me to start using the exterior of my house to express my personality? No you don't.
9. People who sit there doing itemised lists of people who can fuck right off, when there are things they really ought to be doing.
10. People who phone me up when I was just about to do something, so I forget what it was.
11. People who choose a consonant, when I could have made a nine letter word with virtually any vowel.
12. Everybody else. Except you, obviously. You're my lovely readers.

I was hoping it would be him. England are apparently about to sign a new manager, Fabio Capello.

That's England the soccer team, not England the country. Unlike Scotland and Wales, England doesn't even have its own Assembly. Good. Of all the indignities we've heaped on Celtic heads over the centuries, making them have extra elections must be among the worst.

But I digress. I shall revert to unigressing immediately. There will be the usual moans about not having an Englishman, but frankly who gives a toss? As we've recently witnessed, there's simply no point in giving the job to someone who doesn't have the respect of the top players, and that means someone who's used to managing at the top level. In practice, that has to mean someone who's had a few runs in the Champions League.

And who's done that with English teams, in recent years? Wenger, Benitez, Maurinho and Ferguson. Who come from France, Spain, Portugal and Scotland. There are some good English managers, and they've had some good UEFA Cup runs, but none of them have done better than Steve McClaren did with Middlesbrough.

Capello, though, has the right stuff. As a manager, he's won the Italian League five times, the Spanish league twice and the Champions League once. When you factor in his playing career, he's been involved at the highest level for over forty years. He's never managed an international side before, but where are the plausible candidates that have?

He's got a reputation for toughness. His players do as they're told, and his teams earn success without flamboyance. Also, and this is the clincher, he's not known for putting himself about off the pitch. If you know what I mean, and if you remember Sven I'm sure you do.

Get him now. And don't fuck this one up.

If the British weather can be compared to an opera, we've just had the two main themes for winter. It was a bit rainy for a while, but now it's gone a bit cold. For light relief it will be a bit snowy, and everyone will carry on like it was the Ride of the Valkyries. After a while spring will come, and it will be tepid, with occasional freshness. Summers can be a bit hot sometimes, in the middle of the day, and there may be bees. That's the weather forecast for the year, and it's always right.

Aren't you glad I abandoned the Wagnerian metaphor? It seemed only fair. You'd already had the Ride of the Valkyries, and it would have been cruel to make you sit through the rest.

In the States, meanwhile, they have an actual climate. I hadn't realised, but their seasons are like Russia's. October and November are the rainy season, and the Monday night American football game came live from a swamp for a few weeks. Now the permafrost has settled, and the Internet is full of pictures of Yanks in the snow and ice.

It doesn't faze them. The Russian mud stopped the Wehrmacht in their panzer tracks, but the Pittsburgh mud had no discernible effect on the Steelers, who just ran right through it. Now the snow is settling from Seattle to Nantucket, as it's settled from Smolensk to Vladivostok, and they all carry on as if it was perfectly normal. It's about time it snowed, say all the blogs, before returning to the business at hand.

We, on the other hand, regard any climatic interference in the even tenor of our lives as a personal affront. I know I do. If it starts raining when I'm nearly home, I will very regularly raise my eyes to the heavens and cry You couldn't wait another five minutes, could you? as if the elements were conspiring against me personally. My opinions are secular humanist, but my whole being is suffused with animism. I am ashamed of my atavistic magical habits, yet after all these years of trying but failing to banish it from my mind I have become resigned. What ya gonna do? Insh'allah, or something.

I was cheered up by the news today. I don't think that's ever happened before.

It was in the Independent. Apparently the ruling class have decided to save the world after all. Our Government has announced a new program of offshore windfarms, while in America Senate and Congress have both voted new green initiatives to shove down George Bush's oily throat.

I still don't think they've got it, though. Yes, we need windfarms, but they're still pursuing a model in which large scale projects generate energy we pay big business for, at a profit. What's needed is windmills and solar panels on every home and workplace. If the government sold us our energy, then they could kit us all out, and take payment in instalments on every electric bill, out of the money saved. But they don't any more, do they?

There are probably other reasons why it's all just window dressing, and I expect some of you will tell me what they are. Still, at least it was better than opening the paper to see All Earth's governments in Jeremy Clarkson soundalike competition, like you do most days.

For cheering comment, there was Steven Wells in the Guardian. He thinks that the England soccer team are too focused on winining, at the expense of Englishness, and that the solution to this is to make Morrissey the manager. Foreign teams will come to England and they will win. But they will also lose - in ways too subtle for them to ever understand. Genius. He was pilloried in the comments, of course, but who'd want to write an article Guardian commenters liked?

On a less edifyiing note, Man cuts off penis in restaurant. Yes I know, but don't tell me you didn't click on it. Maybe you should have used your irrelevance filter.

I've been saving up loads of links for you, but to be honest I've just been too stressed about all the house business to write properly (I must have the wrong brain chemistry), and now most of them have become yesterday's news. I was momentarily disconcerted, I will admit, but then it occurred to me that this obsolescence was in itself a theme. Here, then, are some stories whose time has come and gone.

Did you know the French played pool and dominos? At the same time? The Americans on the other hand mainly stick to their own sports, but they do at least play them well.

Jimmy Wales says students should be allowed to use Wikipedia. Apparently it's much more accurate since they brought in their new peer review system. I say, if you're going to use it, edit it. Not just the facts. Every time you find a spelling mistake, or (more commonly) punctuation errors or inelegant sentence construction, fix it. It's your encyclopaedia too, you know.

Not that you'll have much luck if you live in the countryside. Apparently there's a town country broadband divide, with peasants still having to check the market price of cornseed by an ancient system of relay hollering, while the rest of us get sports updates through transmitters embedded in our lattés. Good. Teach them to drive down our roads in their SUVs, sneering at the litter. Haven't they got any starlings to kill?

Here, Ben Goldacre is telling us how to fool fingerprint scanners. He points out that the fingerprints you leave can be reproduced, so if they're used as a password, you're effectively leaving a copy of your PIN number every time you touch anything. And that's if the Government hasn't distributed them on free CDs for everyone.

Does all this depress you? Well, at least you aren't any more likely to get cancer.

Soon, a look ahead to Euro 2008.

For some reason, when you order a large coffee in Costa Coffee it comes in something the size and shape of a soup bowl. I did ask if they had any tall mugs, but they just looked at me as people do. Askance.

If you ask me, people who run coffee shops should damn well get over themselves, and their designers should learn the difference between arts and crafts. Making things to drink coffee out of is a craft. It's nice if they're pretty, but the physics should be a priority. The wider the circumference of the brim, the harder it is to drink from. These bowl-cup crossovers actually had a handle on either side, in tacit acknowledgment of the problem they'd deliberately created. How you're supposed to drink coffee and do the crossword at the same time was left unclear. I expect cup designers are too busy reading books by Umberto fucking Eco to think about it.

I like Eco, actually. He writes books, articles and essays, and doesn't interfere in other arenas. He should rein in his acolytes, though.

There's another problem with wide brims, which is rapid heat loss. As a direct result of some poncy little fart's design pretensions, I drank the coffee too fast, and had a rush of blood and caffeine to the head. I needed the loo, so I stood up and strode confidently in the wrong direction, swivelled, walked into a chair, re-oriented myself and then tripped over someone's umbrella.

Fortunately, being a hero, I have a superpower specially for situations like this. It's nothing so crude as invisibility or time travel, nor can I extract the powers of others by eating their brains. In Costa that would just have given me the power to wear cheap jewellery badly. No, my power is the ability to be sublimely indifferent to the opinions of strangers. Like most such gifts, it's been as much a curse as a blessing in my life, in particular when I create embarrassing situations which my friends then have to cope with without my extraordinary skill set. Sometimes I wouldn't be without it though, and this was one of those times.

I needed the coffee because I'd just spent half the afternoon with my mortgage advisor. I'm trying to put together a deal to buy the flat I wanted on top of my house (by on top of I mean as well as, not above), live in the flat and rent out the house. I've no desire to be a landlord, and I don't really want the complication, but I do want the flat, and this seems to be the only way I can have it.

I'll keep you posted. In the meanwhile, demand proper mugs. It's the only way they'll learn.

I may been getting some weirdly high page views, but I'm still in the amateur league compared to some. Well, compared to anyone with any actual income stream at all. In particular, it would be nice to at least have nearly as many digits in my stats as the Guardian.

As things stand, I'm still four digits short. You can see the Guardian website viewer stats for October here. They had 18,407,758 unique visitors in that month. Not unique in the sense that every human being is an incredible one-off miracle, because miracles are of course born out of charlatanry, wishful thinking and tricks of the light, but unique in the sense that 18,407,758 separate IP addresses requested pages. 168,712,972 pages, in fact, at an average of 9.17 pages each. 61% of these users live outside the UK.

What isn't clear from the figures is whether that's 18 million unique readers daily, or across the whole month. In other words, if I visit the Guardian website on the fifth, the seventh and twice on the twelfth, do I count as one reader, or three? Does anyone know?

It's pretty damn good either way. I had 11,893 page views last month. That's 396 a day, without the aid of automatic scanning software. This isn't a bad return for an independent blog with, let's face it, no particular area of expertise, and I've really no grounds to be unhappy, but they get over five million a day. It's almost like they're more important in the greater scheme of things than I am.

Meanwhile, my house sale may be back on. I'm being gazundered, it turns out. This is a tactic in which the buyer tries to lower the previously agreed price just before the sale. This isn't criminal, despite causing its victims more heartache than a joint ever did, but it's considered bad practice. Especially by me. Expect something heartfelt on gazundering soon, but for the moment I shall just note that originally a gazunder was a Victorian chamber pot. I was going to crack on that it was called that because it gaz under the bed, but apparently that's actually true, and I just can't see the point of telling you true things.

The modern usage isn't to do with chamber pots, though, but comes from gazump, which means to do the opposite. Back in the days of the British property boom, when it was a seller's market, prices got pushed up at the last minute instead. To gazunder is to gazump downwards.

I'll keep you posted.

I get about 200 visitors a day in here, and between them they manage 400 page views. It's a nice level of interest, which is slowly rising. The number of page views per visitor goes up and down a lot, with anything between 6 and one and a bit each.

Yesterday I had 197 visitors, which is fairly standard, but they managed 4321 page views between them, at an average of just under 22 each. This is unprecedented. So far today I have had 273 page views from 12 visitors, and we're only an hour in.

I can see two possible explanations. My preferred explanation is that you've all suddenly realised how long I've been brilliant for, and started trawling my back catalog. The other, perhaps more realistic theory is that I'm being scanned in some way. If I suddenly start getting those irritating spam comments, I shall be cross.

Does anyone know anything about this kind of thing?

The BBC have an overly romantic attitude to the FA Cup, if you ask me. They could have shown Bradford v Tranmere, or Oldham v Crewe, or even Bristol Rovers v Rushden if they really wanted that Ealing comedy vibe. But no, they're in love with the idea that the FA Cup is about the minnows, so instead we get Harrogate Railway v Mansfield Town.

Harrogate is a genteel Yorkshire town of the kind you could easily imagine BBC producers living in, and such makes a change from the genteel, producer-friendly Home Counties towns that normally get televised at this stage of the competition. It does have a population of 85,000, and it's perhaps not entirely implausible for their football team to hope for some kind of a run in the cup. Harrogate Railway, though, aren't Harrogate's main team. That's right, we're watching the second best team in Harrogate. The best team in Harrogate, quite reasonably known as Harrogate Town, are two divisions higher. Mansfield are a cool 81 places higher in the league structure.

The ground is less of a stadium, more of a rec. You know, a rec. Oh, so you didn't grow up in a small English town, kicking a ball about the local recreation ground and rolling around in the mud. Well I did, and trust me, we're not quite in jumpers for goalposts territory today, but we're not far off. On one side of the pitch, they've actually used the border between grass and mud to mark the touchline. An admirably efficient use of resources it may be, but it isn't exactly conducive to the long throw in. Apart from anything, it's unnervingly like a speedway track down there.

Even on the pitch itself, it rapidly becomes clear that we aren't in for a cultured spectacle. It looks green enough on the long shots, but in the closeups you can see that chlorophyll is gradually losing the battle with an older and simpler kind of primordial soup. The Harrogate players are clearly used to re-enacting Passchendaele every weekend, and use their knowledge of the field to hop precisely from one divot to the next, but I'm sure I saw at least one Mansfield midfielder sinking into a soggy bit, never to be seen again.

I turn to Channel 5, where they've got the Fiorentina (Florence) v Inter Milan game. Fiorentina's stadium looks like it's been dropped in from space by a technologically superior civilisation, and the players must be from another planet as well. I've not seen so many dainty little flicks since Ross Dawson won the Kenilworth under 9s Subbuteo championship.

So I'm quite surprised to find myself switching back to the northern mudbath. It's the invective I crave as much as anything. Fuck off, you fucking Yorkshire twat, comes the cry from the Mansfield end, and you recall the passion generated by county boundaries. Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire are different places. There's the M1, and then there's the A1, and never the twain shall meet.

Some of the rivalries in that part of the world have been simmering for a while. In the centre of York is a small keep on a hill, known as Clifford's tower. It's called that because they hung the Lancastrian Roger Clifford there in 1365, and left his body there for years. After a while it became a landmark - turn left at Clifford, and it's the second hovel on the right - and the name stuck. Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire don't have quite such a brutal tradition, but lots of people still remember the differing responses of the two counties to the miners' strike.

In the event, Harrogate make a game of it. They lose 3-2, but win all our hearts, yada yada yada. As it turns out it's not just the invective I crave, it's also the soul. And the romance. After the game they have the draw for the next round, and Mansfield get a trip to Brighton. Bristol City, meanwhile, are drawn at home to Middlesbrough, for the second year in a row. After taking them to a replay, extra time and penalties last year, and beating Watford 2-1 away yesterday to go back into the playoff zone, we won't feel overawed. Rovers have to go to Fulham, and will.

On another planet, probably the same one Inter Milan come from, they drew groups for Euro 2008. The most interesting group has Italy, France, Holland and Rumania in it. I'm going to stick my neck out, and say that's the group the winner's coming from. More about that soon, I'm sure.