Oh gosh OK there’s quite a lot to get through.

One of my most received message all week was, “Did you do KFC for Christmas?”. Let’s cut straight to the chase so you can close this tab and get back to doomscrolling: the answer is no. I considered getting the “Party Barrel” but — for the price it seemed like horrible value (as well as a lot of food) so I let it sell out. Instead I picked up some Family Mart & Lawson fried chicken on the day, since they were still discounted but could come in much smaller servings and I had that instead. It was OK, and the roast chicken was borderline good (and not on KFC’s menu) but the fried chicken is - just that - fried chicken. Picture in the little collage at the bottom.

This week in data:

• 🎵 Number of times WHAM!'d: 13 Last Christmasses
• 🎄 Christmas trees observed: 12 trees
• 🎅 Occurrences of the word "Christmas" in this article: 10

For lack of any carols I pulled up the Salvation Army’s yearly shindig on the BBC Sounds app. I tried to listen to King’s College Chapel service about some number of carols and lessons — but it’s locked-up, gated and paywalled in so many ways outside of the UK that calling it a religious ceremony seems slightly inaccurate? First year without hearing “Once in Royal David's City”. :^(

The day itself was a work-day, so inspired by the venerable DB many years prior I brought in some fancy biscuits (jaffa cakes) and had a lot of fun telling people that — for tax purposes — they were cakes. The tin had a working clock too — which I'm definitely keeping.

There's Christmas music [editor's note: no longer only WHAM!, but mostly still WHAM!], there's pretty lights and there's beautiful Christmas trees. But there isn't really the atmosphere. Which makes sense — solstice is celebrated another way, New Years is the family gathering and only roughly 1% of the population are Christian.

On Christmas Eve my plans changed and I had to be near home to pick up a package (originally they involved going to a party) — but this worked out in my favour because it turns out that the office is a prime viewing spot for the Odaiba Rainbow Fireworks. They were stunning. Unfortunately I couldn't get any better photos.

Joined the biweekly Mölkky group after work, and played a few games. I’m not saying that I’m good at Mölkky (3/5 of my throws were bad throws) but of the three rounds of “best of three” match-ups, my team won each time. In all seriousness though, it’s lots of fun! Balancing strategic throws against a stick which could just bounce the wrong direction builds a kind of suspense I wasn’t expecting from a low-impact sport.

Experienced the Japanese hospital system for the first time for a routine outpatients thing, and all I can really say about it — having only really dealt with the British healthcare system before — is that it felt incredibly dignified.

Every year I speed-run Metroid fusion around christmas day. I don’t know why, it’s a strange little tradition I accidentally invented sometime in my early teens. Anyway this year playing the Japanese copy of Fusion I got last week, I managed a PB. I'm putting it down to slightly better routing.

I dabbled around a few stories (ok, a large portion of it was donki) looking for christmas gifts. Disappointingly most of them are KitKats. But not all.

I also looked for cards, and bought a bunch without checking what they were — it turns out that instead of being thick because they conatined card stock, they were thick because they were small multi-packs (3) of envelopes. So now I have a lot. Anyone want an impeccably decorated New Years ~card~ envelope? (I couldn't find a single, non-Disney-branded Christmas card)

This week sort-of closes with boarding a plane for my admin-and-new-years-trip back to the UK. It isn’t very clear but during the first leg of the flight we flew over Mount Fuji.

Hong Kong International’s terminal is unfathomably huge - and so there were moments where I genuinely felt lost, but: There’s a mini-Duddells in there meaning Michelin-star roast duck before your flight and it can’t get any better than that.

PS can I just point out that this is the first year where I didn't miss a week? Even though I said I would. Being more gentle with the editing cycle, and keeping a running notes doc in "iA Writer" makes this all a bit easier.