Actually my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.

The denominational world tries to pressure its members to focus on the birth of Christ but in doing so layers of guilt are imposed and competition gets complicated as one Christmas program tries to outdo the other.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights ' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

Black Friday is not another bad hair day in Wall Street. It's the term used by American retailers to describe the day after the Thanksgiving Holiday seen as the semi-official start of Christmas shopping season.

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

There's a little vanity chair that Charlie gave me the first Christmas we knew each other. I'll not be parting with that nor our bed - the four-poster - I'll be needing that to die in.

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.

There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.

That's the true spirit of Christmas people being helped by people other than me.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other I usually chose the beautiful.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it human and otherwise are imaginary excepting only certain of the fairy folk whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

These days I'm mostly familiar with two parts of L.A.: one is movie culture and the other is Asian culture. The Westside is work and the Eastside is Chinese - which means my friends.

Another Black Label motto. That's what I think life is. It's just another bridge to cross. You ask no questions. Whatever work it is you gotta do you gotta go over it under it through it around it to do it.

The companies that make meaningful contributions while also listening to the voices of others are the ones that will genuinely engage their community who will then go to work for them.

But I'm pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.

To me as long as we've known each other I've always thought Mick's most brilliant thing was that he could work in an area two foot square and give a very exciting performance.

You see my mother was a district nurse until she died when I was 14 and we used to move from time to time because of her work.