Thank goodness it's all over.
Christmas.
Not the carol singing, good cheer, time spent with the family and catching up with old friends. I'm not quite the Scrooge I'm depicting myself as.
I'm just glad to see the back of the ridiculous press releases that are dispatched at the festive period, almost like the government times its bad news.
Exhibit A: 21 December dumped a release into my inbox about researchers at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology having created the world's smallest bible - "a full version of the 308,428-word Hebrew Bible, with vowel points, on 0.5
square millimetres" - a pin head.
A technical miracle it may be, but with its stated target as "increasing interest in nanoscience among the youth", again the word "pin head" springs to mind.
Notwithstanding my lack of goodwill, printers looking to offer pin-head, print-production services should point their browsers at www.britishtechnionsociety.org.
Exhibit B: the same day I received a release from Greetz announcing its empire-building Internet-based greetings card service is being extended into the UK.
"The UK greeting-card market is the
most successful in the world with over 2.87 billion cards sold at retail last
year (an average of 55 per person), worth an estimated £1.3 billion, according
to the Greeting Card Association (GCA). Greetz recognises that there is a gap in
the market to fulfil UK demand," it claimed.
A
gap in the market? For greeting cards? If only you could get cards in, say, a supermarket, or a high
street shop. I’m fed up of having to track down dealers in dark allies to get a
few grammes of greeting.
I rest my case.