I wrote some Christmas cards today on a card showing the Flight into Egypt in the form of a rather stiff mosaic from “St Virgin Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church in Cairo” – Aid to the Church in Need. I don't know what relationship, if any, that church has with the scene of today's atrocity. Perhaps tomorrow's newspapers will make it clear.

AA Gill's final column wasn't as good as I expected. Perhaps the themes of pain and fear and chemotherapy and the cost of nivolumab have been too thoroughly explored already by other doomed journalists. Perhaps it's hard to sparkle when you're dying. The cancer was already all over the place when it was discovered at the end of the summer. He might -- it's easy to say, in retrospect -- have been more comfortable and more productive with palliative care, and might have had just as much time. But he clearly expected something to be DONE. So perhaps active intervention was palliative, for him, although uncomfortable. He was only 62, scarcely older than my children. At the end, he was taking nivolumab, probably at his own expense.

I finished a second swatch, much pleasanter knitting on slightly larger needles. I haven't yet measured either. Do I really have to wash them? Surely, Ross won't wash his hat.

Then I went back to the shawl, and am now two scallops short of finishing the second-side edging, and feeling calmer and more confident.

I think I’ll start that stripey hat as soon as the package of needles turns up from Meadow Yarns – tomorrow? It's good stuff for these dark days.

And tomorrow I hope to go up to the post office and dispatch the American Christmas cards. Then (maybe) I will feel calmer and more confident about Christmas.