My sister has hinted I might care to buy her another dog. I was going to suggest a budgie and then remembered we'd had one of those. It escaped from its cage and was chased by the dog, diving into the toilet bowl in a desperate attempt to avoid being eaten. It survived but became as neurotic as the dog, falling off its perch every time it heard a toilet flush. Ah, yes, those were the days.

Selecting a gift for my father is fraught with difficulty, although I am tempted this year to buy him a stethoscope. This thought occurred to me least week when I visited the ancestral estate to find Mum in a less than expansive mood. She blamed this lack of festive spirit on Dad, explaining that she had been sleeping soundly the previous night when he had shaken her awake. Thinking he was unwell, she sprang upright.

   "What's the matter?" she cried.
   "It's all right," he said. "You were sleeping so soundly I thought you were dead."
   "You woke me up to ask me if I was dead?" shrieked Mum.
   "Just checking," said Dad, and rolled over and went back to sleep.

I was going to put it around the family that I would view a replacement for the vicious, finger-gouging ironing board of which I wrote a number of weeks ago as a suitable present for myself. But it bit the hand that ironed it once too often last week, triggering a fight to the death. When the last blow had been landed, I stood triumphant and the ironing board looked like a ski jump, one end pointing skywards. I tossed its carcass in an industrial bin and now have a new one which is proving to be more docile than its predecessor.

My cousin has again bravely raised his hand to host the family gathering, one which Uncle Pat can be guaranteed to enliven with one of his minor quirks. Last year, he excelled his previous efforts when, on being asked the time by one of his nephews, he reached into one of the pockets of his voluminous shorts and produced a large alarm clock attached to a piece of string which he consulted and then returned to his pocket. "I lost my watch," he said. A reasonable enough explanation, I suppose.

This will be my second year without a Christmas tree, though as I now possess two potted palms on my balcony, perhaps I could decorate one of these appropriately. Doubtless families will drive from all over Brisbane to sit and stare in wonderment at Marc Willems's Christmas palm, draped with the contents of a $10 box of fairy lights from Crazy Clark's and decorated with the bottle tops from several dozen empty Fourex stubbies.

I really must get to a music store and buy a CD of Christmas carols. I will play this on Sunday mornings which, apart from lending a seasonal flair to the apartment block, will drown out the discussion that invariably floats down from a nearby balcony. This discussion, conducted loudly, centres on the sexual exploits of the three middle-aged women who live there and whose Saturday night activities involve determined, and apparently largely successful, attempts to bed the entire male population of inner-city Brisbane.