Andrew's Christmas poem is a cracker. Mary is for the most part best served by visual art - lots of amazing annunciation paintings in the Renaissance. Also his thoughts on the family Christmas focus are accurate.

I will not spare the reader all the details. We watched most of Stalingrad because James and I thought it was so interesting even though it damped the festive atmosphere a bit. Its the German team who did Das Boot - so its a contemporary German perspective on that nodal event in their history. Good reference to Lebensraum as the team ride across the endless Russian steppes - the soldiers expect to be given 10000 acres and 10 Russian wives. Filmically I think its quite like Full Metal Jacket - well the second half - close combat and gender issues (Russian women soldiers)- some references to Ashes and Diamonds.

Vita likes her Redhot Chillis DVD - its just the one song and then a lot of stuff about how its made - film of the film. But the bassplayer (who is her hero) features prominently.

I gave my sister a 4 CD set of Ella Fitzgerald. Her enthusiasm for Frank Sinatra was a major influence on me between the ages of 7 and 14 - and you can argue that if your older sister is going to play a lot of anything then there are plenty worse artists to chose. I have been listening to the Ella story of Friday nights driving home. She makes an interesting comparison to Billie Holiday - widely regarded as the best jazz singer ever - but I think you could argue the case the other way. In looking at the "standard" its a commonplace that the people who make them standard are Frank and Miles - who actually stick very close to each other's repertoire - either because those are the best songs or because they quietly track each other. But Ella reviews the who Broadway songbook via its masters and makes more material available - she also uses a wider range of arrangers than FS - and she avoids abjection.

La Senza seemed to go down OK.

James bought me a book about the incidence of primes. A bit of a coincidence as I had just seen the relevance of primes to drone theory. There is no need (say) in building the drone on C to put in the ninth harmonic - D - because as a non-prime its already there - naturally occurring as the third harmonic or third hamonic -G. Do the key harmonics (of C) are the primes - G E Bb and then a funny note around A. That chord itself would be a thing to conjour with.

Anyway here's an "indication" that there is no highest prime number. If you have the putative highest prime number all you have to do is to take all the lower ones up to that point - multiply them together and add one and you have created another higher one. Even so the density or incidence of primes decreases as the number series goes on and indeed is roughly proportional to the logarithm. So if you work out how many prime numbers there are say between 1 and 30 ( 11 - I think) - then then are approximately the same number between 31 and 300 or between 301 and 3000. But that relationship is not perfect - there are deviations and its the mathematics of those deviations that the book looks at.

Also a subscription to the New York Review of Books and a book on Pollock.

Sharon Osbourne played her hand well I thought. James won Monopoly.

Maybe Jake had too much turkey - but it was good walking on the hill with him in the morning - not completely overcast but quite turbulent skies.