This is the quietest day I've had all year, possibly for a number of years; other than responding to a hurried "good morning" from an old man as I was taking a short cut through the Chiswick Old Cemetery (he was alive by the way, not a resident), I've not said a word to a soul.

As I've said to numerous people over the years, and continue to, solitude holds no particular terrors for me. I can dwell on my own resources without discomfit. Being an only child, it's an instinct.

My great excitement - albeit a silent one in a still frozen world, (so cold even at lunchtime, can't have been higher than zero) - was for the first time ever seeing a Heron catch and eat something. Just by the Lilliputian hump backed bridge spanning the Chiswick House lake, which has the iron hard tenor of the Bering Sea in Winter, inch thick ice, were two Chinese women throwing bread and unbelievably, cocktail sausages, to a mewling motley of gulls, mallards, mandarin ducks, scrabbling pigeons, and an aristocratic looking Heron.

The smaller birds harried each other for the small balls of bread; Senor Heron concentrated solely on spearing every cocktail sausage with that gimlet of a beak, then dipping it in the margins of the lake that were n't icebound.

Thanks to the very excitable little boy stood next to me, shouting to his father, I know why they do this: lubricating a catch makes it easier to swallow.

Christmas on your own, uneventful, dull ? No, not at all.