Halle-fricking-lujah my out of office is on and I am (technically) on leave until 5 January.

I say technically because I have to nip into the office stupidly early tomorrow to pick up some keys and make some posters, and possibly work a couple of hours one day over the weekend. I will also be very swiftly checking email at least once a day most of next week. Then I plan to have some serious offline time as far as work is concerned between 29 December and 5 January.

They're introducing a new "email over 5 years old gets trashed" rule in January so I have some 20,000 emails to check and delete before then (my predecessors did not believing in archiving important stuff) so I'll be scanning/deleting over the break.

And I have my own epic cleaning, clearing, sorting and decluttering project to deal with over the 17 glorious days that I have to get my shit together. I have a master plan and so many lists with a multiplicity of bullet points! And the icing on the cake the ex is at the cottage from 20 December to 6 January so I can make free use of his washing machine.

My hope is to start the first working week of 2026 from a tidy flat with no more chairdrobes or piles of washing to be done or put away.

I'm sure my plans are overly ambitious but I'm looking forward to seeing what I can actually get done before 5 January rocks around.