I'm sure that snow used to be something exciting rather than a complete nuisance as it has been over the last few winters. Thankfully we got away on about the day before the big snowstorms started in Boston, sat next to my academic sister in the exit row of the plane (after having glanced at each other repeatedly on the airport bus trying to remember where we knew each other from) and made it to Inverurie with no problems. We are now snowed in with all roads out of the town blocked and being kept alive by supplies from the 24-hour Tesco - I'm on the car insurance this week but it's unable to leave the garage, and though I hate to say it, I think it would now be quite a mental effort for me to drive on the left.

To get us out of the house we've been visiting various family friends around the town with presents, and seeing just how much has changed - there are roundabouts where no roundabouts have been before and Oldmeldrum now has a bypass, which is an unexpected but welcome surprise. We went to have afternoon tea* with a family we've known through the church and their entire house had been rebuilt in the time since I'd been there last.

The biggest change about Inverurie over the last decade is that everything has had a cafe added to it. It started with the dairy adding one, then there was McPhersons, an ornament/household/pet shop (which was one of the weirder combinations to start with), the jeweller, most of the bakeries, and now the entire bottom floor of the West Church has been converted into a volunteer-run cafe with a gift shop called Ubuntu. The actual church part is upstairs - I'll be seeing that for the first time at the watchnight service tonight.

This morning one of my dad's students from India came round to meet us with his wife and brother, which we thought would be a fairly uneventful visit. But after about five minutes he produced an Eastern European friend who had been hiding in the car with two giant boxes, and got my dad to open them, producing first a TV table and then a flatscreen TV that's even bigger than Eamonn Holmes - his wife and her family had raised the money for it to thank my dad for his teaching as well as playing a role in sorting out the relationships between his and his wife's families (it's a long story). It's set up in the study just now and taking up most of one wall - it's made my mum awfully stressed because they'd only sent him a box of chocolates, and they have no idea where to find room for it. And that they'll probably have to move to a new house with a big enough living room.

Still, now we're going to sing carols around the hospice, which will be about as giant a barrel of laughs as you can imagine.

* Yes, this happens