W ell, I'm back from Iowa and I've traded one lot of snow for another. Usually when I arrive back in the UK, it's raining, but it's rare that the climate is so similar.

I guess I should have been a tad more specific when I hoped for a White Christmas... (the careless vagueness in wish has proven the same as saying 'More David Tennant on the telly would be okay this year...') But weather-wise, though there's still snow on the ground in both countries, the English kind is infinitely more depressing.

The snow and ice in America might be biting cold, the kind that stops the feeling in your hands minutes before you notice it, but it feels clean and fresh. England on the other hand is just damp, miserable, grey mass. If Iowegian landscapes are either christmas card perfect or as brittle and sharp as a cleanly-cut knife, then the Leeds variety is like being slowly smothered by an apathetic, hungover and deeply mottled penguin.

Ironically after four weeks of TRULY severe weather, it was the unsalted and ungriited pavements in Horsforth that nearly did me in. The local council, like many, have almost (shamefully) run out and so it's every person and A&E department for themselves. No mail, fewer buses and trains... all after a few inches of snow and ice. Iowa had twenty inches in a day and still the mail got through. Doesn't it make you proud?

I'm not sure when I'll be back in Iowa. It will largely depend on finances and work. However there's potential to get Jilly over here, maybe around the time of her birthday, so we'll see how things go in the next few months.

But life goes on. Despite feeling as out-of-it as I always do after a long trip away, there's much to be done. Impact should go to bed on Friday (though it will most likely be Monday), I have to sort details for next week's Cinema Days event that I'm attending; I should be doing some DVD design work shortly and then there's my accounts-filing on which to ruminate. In short, January will be a busy month.