Every morning when I walk from our front door to the shelter where my car is parked I'm faced with the fact that people go crazy in the darkness of December. I can live with a moderate amount of non-coloured Christmas lights (I have one string of led lights tangled on a lattice in our terrace) but the plenty of red, green and blue lights on every tree, bush and window you can imagine is a bit too much. My neighbours think differently. They are determined to beat the darkness with their Christmas lights - some of them doing pretty good job. This overwhelming lightshow almost causes me a headache before I reach my car.

Yesterday our office had a total power cut in the morning - it lasted about 30 minutes. And it is very dark in December. No electricity, no email, no coffee, no going in or out of the office, no working lifts and on top of it, no candles allowed. One colleague had a torch, that's all the light we had. And I almost missed my neighbours' multicolour Christmas lightshow...

The power cut that affected thousands of people working in the offices of that area was caused by one single squirrel that had managed to find its way into a power substation. The poor creature died in the incident. They say the blackout was actually a terrorist attack - the master mind behind it was Orava (the Finnish word for "squirrel") Bin Laden...

Obviously an accident - the real target must have been my neighbourhood. Maybe I didn't pay the terrorist enough?

My way or the highway...