Christmas Double Issue / 500 - 5 comments

Looks like this year'll be the first in ten (or so) that I haven't bought the "Festive" edition of the New Statesman to tide me over those awkward gaps in the Yuletide period between getting up and it being seemly to grab a sherry (well, this). I can't say I've enjoyed the last couple of seasonal ones, and spent a fair while last year irritating my sister by reading extracts with rising incredulity, from the many (frankly) bourgeois, mithering articles; lists of reasons why certain media types will never forgive Tony Blair; and wish-lists for the World in 2007. I suppose I'll miss the crossword, and conservative philosopher (and Uni-era hate-figure)-turned-wine buff Roger Scruton's column on - don't tell me - the aesthetics of wine-drinking, and how the Ancient Greeks solved the old "glass v. bucket-with-a-straw" dilemma.

I've already got The Economist's double issue (whose back pages don't feature word games, or the NS's obligatory Philosophy Football ads, but a table indicating that Sierra Leone still leads the world in child mortality, and that Zimbabwe's nearly doubled between 1990 and 2005), but perhaps I could manage two, this year. So, what should I go for? (My first) Prospect at a hefty £4.50? Or should I just save my money and see what the blogosphere turns up? Or just buy balloons?

Incidentally, this is my 500th post here. Was it good for you? That works out at a rather poor 0.74 posts/day, though the new Blogger tells me I have no fewer than 104 unpublished drafts.