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Happy Christmas. I hope you’re happy and well and pleasantly full of mince pies and warm booze.

This Christmas is rather different from usual for me. Firstly, I’m at work. It’s the last day of term, so I’m writing this in the staffroom, while all the kids tidy up the school. Secondly, it’s the warmest Christmas I’ve ever known. Until a few days ago, the weather was getting pretty chilly – cold wind, drizzle. Familiar British weather, really – necessitating winter coat and woolly hats outside, and an electric heater inside. But on Monday, after two or three weeks of increasingly cold weather, it suddenly cleared up, and since then it’s just been beautifully sunny.

My reason for going on about the weather is not so much to rub in the fact that I’m on a small tropical island, but just that with this warm sunny weather and me in a t-shirt, I’m having trouble getting my head around the fact that it’s Christmas.

Considering how ‘bah, humbug’ I usually get around Christmas time, though, a small Japanese island is probably not a bad place for me: the extent of the Christmas celebrations here seems to be that people eat a cake, perhaps with a Father Christmas on top. No month-long build-up to a shopping frenzy to mark the birthday of someone who would really probably not have been that into shopping frenzies, and this year I’ve only heard Paul McCartney’s horrible ‘Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time’ once. So, Christmas on a small Japanese island: strange, but not too bad.

Still, a bit of mulled wine and a mince pie wouldn’t go amiss…

as of 12:00pm PST (3:00am GMT), air temperature was 24C. there were a few small clouds at approx. 3500ft. visibility was hazy (<7miles).