We went on holiday to Morocco from 12th-21st December, and being disorganised we failed to send any Christmas cards (if anyone was wondering why they hadn't received one last year.)

We were then much more tired than expected and went flop for three days. This was in spite of expecting Michael's uncle to stay and having invited my mother and niece (visiting her from Australia) for Christmas dinner.

Christmas Day was Thursday. On the Monday Michael realised that he had picked up a cold on the trip and rang his uncle to ask if he was willing to run the risk of catching it. He had in any case been a bit dubious about the journey and staying over, and this tipped the balance, so he decided not to come. I had already cleared the cat things (feeding station, litter tray, bedding) out of the spare room in anticipation, but to be honest we were relieved about having one fewer guest to worry about. This turned out to be unexpectedly fortunate in view of later developments.

I had ordered a duck and a Christmas pudding from the Gog farm shop, but we had signally failed to do any other preparation. I thought I could probably manage to do everything necessary on Thursday morning.

On Christmas morning my niece texted me to say that my mother was unwell and could I pick up some over the counter medication from a pharmacist. There was one pharmacist open in Cambridge on Christmas day. Fortunately this was over towards the Girton side of town, where my mother lives. I drove over expecting a long queue of sick people, but in fact there was only one other customer there when I arrived.

My mother took the medication and went back to bed. There was no point in my staying as my niece was there, but we kept in touch by phone and text. Towards the evening my mother woke up again, but was no better so I went over and we rang NHS 111. Unexpectedly, we got though in a (relatively) few minutes.

My mother is 93 so is taking medication for various other long term ailments, and it took a while to explain the situation to the person on the other end of the line. He said, "I can only deal with one problem on this call, so which is is that you want me to focus on?" He made us an appointment with the after hours GP at Addenbrookes, at 21:45.

Michael drove us over to the hospital. Mum isn’t very mobile at the best of times, but fortunately there was a stack of hospital wheelchairs by the door at outpatients so I grabbed one and after that I just wheeled Mum around in it, which was much easier. Even though the hospital seemed very empty we still had to wait for ages. We finally saw the GP who provided us with antibiotics and we got Mum home after midnight.

As we still had the Christmas food we decided to go over to Girton a few days later and cook it all in my Mum's kitchen. It turned out that she still wasn’t feeling well so she called NHS 111 again while I cooked. By the time we left (about 6 pm) she was still expecting a call back.

I spoke to her the next day and she said that she had had an actual visit that evening from another doctor who had brought a different type of antibiotics, which had finally worked.

In fact the belated Christmas dinner was quite jolly as my niece had a friend staying, and the young people made it very convivial.