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Roundabout this time each year I write Christmas cards to people in far-flung corners of the world. Many of them I'm in regular contact with, which is to say that I send a card each year but, other than that, the opportunities for an exchange of life events are few.

A Christmas card is an ideal place to offer a tantalising glimpse of the year in the form of a quickly scribbled note - it's a small space, and since you have a couple of dozen cards to write everyone forgives you for only writing a sentence. My grandmother was a card-note expert. I'd often get something like "Going to Totnes for lunch Tuesday. Not as sunny as last week. Garden looking lovely. Uncle Eric dead."

Computers didn't help with card-writing. They're e printed on thick toilet paper so absorbent that any attempt to mass produce a card message leaves you with an illegible black blob where the words should be.

Instead there is the Christmas Letter. Some people are good at writing them, and craft a small work of literary genius with colour photos, amusing side bars and accounts of the family's adventures and achievements over the past year. "Back in July Derek completed his second masters, this time in Greek philosophy, and Teddy won the state archery championships. Florence continues to impress us all with her French Horn."

I can never think of anything to say. The house didn't blow up or fall down. I didn't change job/wife, no additional children popped out, the dog is the same goofy furrball as last year. And nothing that I have done really seems significant enough to commit to a once-a-year letter. We went on a holiday to Busselton, of which there would be photos, except that I broke my camera on the first day. I went on a business trip. There are now plants in the garden. Everyone is doing OK.

Very soon the postal deadline and my own procrastination will mean I don't have to think about it any more.

At least, for another year...