We're chipping away at our capacity for wonder. When hologram TVs eventually go on sale, they'll cost £20,000 and be bought only by those strange, heroic, friendless men who live in flats piled high with giant 80s mobiles and DVD players weighing eight stone.

I'm nostalgic for the future I knew as a kid. Back then, it was a lovely, bleepy, heavenly land populated by svelte men in white polo necks, who would lounge on big white sofas sipping blue wine from big glass globes, beside women like the ones on the covers of Hedkandi chill out compilations.

Fling but a stone, the giant dies.

How strange to use 'You only live once' as an excuse to throw it away.

In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.

Christmas movies, it's a hard thing to do. The danger is you just end up with a Hollywood star with a Santa beard. You risk it being fake and cheesy and not real.