Merry Christmas

It scares me to think that if my Dad was a lumberjack he'd look like Ernest Hemingway.

I think an excess of family has done something terrible to my brain. Spent Christmas at a bizarre country cottage extravaganza that was part awkward family reunion and part giant house party full of complete strangers (who we invited along to ease the awkwardness). Along with my immediate family of four there was my aunt and uncle and three cousins, plus three kids Olly brought with him from the UN conference in Poland, four Japanese college friends of my aunt, who had nowhere else to go, and a hamster called Hamlet. Half of us ate vegan chickpea curry, with spinach, while the others had pheasant, venison sausages, and gravy, so everyone was happy. And dessert was gluten free christmas pudding with soy cream, amazing.

Now I'm recovering by locking myself in my flat, where no-one related to me can find me. My Christmas presents this year consisted of a pad of origami post-it notes, two books, a hideous eighties jumper for my collection, and a pair of enormous rainbow shorts. My housemate Sam spent Christmas day birdwatching in Sussex, so I can't complain. We are both recovering by playing with Hemingway's head, and redecorating the flat while our other housemates are away. Check out the previously beige living room-

Paris is full of dead people

Went to Paris for a week, which was awesome, although there seemed to be a morbid undertone to most of my activities. I went to Pere Lachaise cemetery and visited the graves of Moliere, Proust, Edith Piaf, and Colette. It was freezing cold and I walked like a drunken person the entire time because my feet were frozen solid, but the graveyard was amazing and I became obsessed with these creepy porcelain flowers heaps of the graves have on them. They have soft beautiful green moss growing in the crevices between the petals. I also went to the Catacombs, which are a huge network of ancient tunnels underneath the city, where thousands of peoples bones were relocated from the Paris cemeteries in the 17th Century. We walked for about two kilometers in these dark stone tunnels underground until we came to the ossuary, which just went on and on and on for miles, with human skulls and bones stacked head height on either side of you as far as you could see. They search your bag at the end of the tunnels to make sure you haven't stolen any bones. It creeped me out, I tried to hold my breath the entire time so as not to breathe in dead people, so I ended up giving myself a splitting headache.

The other highights were the Palais de Tokyo, which was having a 'Baby Disco' the night we went, and an amazing vegan restauraunt that did Franch style tofu in red wine. Also, I was on a train on the Metro which actually ran over a man on the tracks. We were all terrified and locked in the carriage while everyone outside was screaming and running around, and then, amazingly, this man pulled himself out from under the train, totally unharmed. He was a bit dirty and bruised, and in total shock, but he must have managed to duck underneath the train as it went over him. Other than this all I did in Paris was eat macaroons, drink Kir, and walk around a lot on my stupid club-like frozen feet going to galleries.

Helsinki

I went to Helsinki for the weekend and ate a lot of cake and drank my bodyweight in terrible coffee (the Finnish have the highest coffee intake per capita of any nation). It was dull and grey and disappointing when I got there, and I was staying in a hostel inside the 1952 Olympic Stadium, which didn't help since I despise anything Olympic. But on the second day there was a massive snow storm and everything became spectacularly beautiful, though cold. I was wearing extremely inappropriate shoes (check out www.hel-looks.com for confirmation), and I kept falling over in the middle of the street and getting horrible bruises, but the snow made me too happy to care. I went to lots of cool design museums and galleries, and touched a dead reindeer, and ate cloudberry jam, and drank mulled wine in little huts by the roadside. And once in a cafe a bunch of drunk skinheads harrassed me and chased my into the street trying to touch me and saying gross things in bad English.

I thought that was going to be the low point of the trip but then I got a ferry out to this little island fortress called Suomenlinna in the middle of a snow storm and got lost and actually though I was going to die. It was impossible to see more than twenty centimetres in front of you, it was freezing, and the island was total wilderness with no lights or buildings or people just huge piles of snow and crashing waves and rocks. I finally found one person who completely ignored me when I threw myself upon her asking for help, so I burst into tears and abandonnned myself to dying in a snow drift in front of an abandonned old hall. Luckily, it turned out to be the youth hostel, which was in darkness because I was their only guest (probably their only guest in years). It took me an hour to defrost my hands, and they're still a funny colour two weeks later.