The best thing about coming home (apart from family) is the stuff waiting in plastic tubs on the kitchen table for me to read, look at, play with, watch, sign or inspect.
This morning, with a scratchy too-much-travel throat and hair that looks like some kind of mad tonsorial octopus, I pulled on my dressing gown and went downstairs and looked at the stuff that had arrived in my absence.
There's stuff I'm excited about reading -- John Clute's book The Darkening Garden, subtitled A Short Lexicon of Horror, thirty subjects from "affect" to "vastation" that will probably influence the critical discussion of horror for a good while to come, and volume 1 of the new Fantagraphics Segar Popeye collection, -- and there's stuff I've already read, sort of, like the Drawn and Quarterly Tove Jansen Moomin volume 1 (you can read the Moomin daily strips on the D&Q website, at http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/moomin/), which is one of the sweetest, strangest surrealist strips in history, and which I read earlier this year, because I wanted to write the introduction to it, and then time got away from me and it was something I didn't write this year, but the D&Q people seem to have forgiven me, for they sent me a copy anyway, and you should read it anyway, for it will make you happy.
(To read the Moomin strips in order online, you should start at #1, http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/moomin/index.php?id=1)
There's stuff waiting I have to listen to (now playing, the reissue of Lou Reed's CONEY ISLAND BABY, with three previously unheard tracks), and to watch (a pile of illicit Torchwoods, the Mighty Boosh Live DVD, and suchlike).
And there's a didgeridoo.
It's significantly taller than I am.
Someone sent me a didgeridoo.
I suppose now I'm going to have to get didgeridoo lessons.
Also, I made the cranberry jelly.