Merry Christmas!

... kind of

Absolutely! It was always just this strange curiosity about Christmas I'd never given too much thought to be honest, like 'ah I remember the smell of Christmas' even though it didn't return...

The decoration, lest ye wish to see:

Nothing to identify it, or what exactly the smell is, but another brother thought it was a cedar mix. A few years on and the decoration is still going strong, and huzzah this year I finally found a candle for myself that vaguely smells like it - a cedar blue.

At last, Christmas smells right again.

I went round my sister's to expressly see for myself and indeed, there was the smell. Still working maybe 40 years after my mum first bought it. It's an odd little fabric thing with an angel on it which my brother said was called The Spirit of Christmas.

A couple of years back in discussions with my siblings we realised we all remembered this smell and big plot twist, it came from a scented tree decoration which my sister still had. A single decoration that made our whole house smell. And bigger plot twist, this decoration STILL had that smell.

I must get on these, I've had World Running Down on my list forever.

Treat yourself or your family and friends to a brutal walk through the woods with the scouts this Christmas, and keep going all the way through to the latest addition, A Winter's Mercy, for extra seasonal adventure:
books2read.com/u/3GGYW8

She is a typo renegade. But now I want to read this book too

Yet as I said at the start, this is a long and pointless story, with no resolution yet.

I've now ordered a copy from eBay and wait tensely to see if that's finally going to arrive.

And what, if anything, will I find in Book 34 that *they* don't want me to see...

Once again, the book was scrubbed from their system, no longer listed.

Hence my conclusion that this particular book is cursed.

It doesn't just keep disappearing on me, it keeps disappearing from the internet whenever I nail it down.

But a few days passed without being told it was out for delivery. Usually they send stuff straight away.

Eventually, I logged in to check, and found the order listed as 'refunded'. I'd received no notification about this, it just said 'unfulfilled' and I checked to find I had indeed been refunded.

Cutting my losses, I went ahead and bought Book 34 myself, from my trusted World of Books (also, incidentally, based here in Worthing, don't you know).

I've bought countless books from them never with a problem, and was happy to see they had it, as they only have a few from the series at any time.

One was then reported missing, which was even odder considering the book was not on the system before, while the other was listed as On Order. So they'd gone from not having it, to having one, to not having two. All at the time my own library lost theirs.

I lost patience waiting for the new copy.