So now that the Christmas season is behind us, the reindeer bum fruit has been cleaned off the roof and the Santa trap we installed on our fake chimney has failed (yet again) maybe it's time to do a wrap up of the Wuiske Christmas on Planet Jandowae.

In any case, Mum, Jade and I worked diligently through the night (Jade up until 2am Christmas morning making gingerbread men) and upon our surfacing the following morning we discovered that the evil one on day release from his North Pole Prison Camp had in fact deposited enough neatly wrapped parcels beneath our tree to seriously strain the floorboards.

As well as this, he had set up a rather large scale Thomas The Tank Engine (insert all relevant trademarks and copyrights here) around the tree. So after having almost woken up and lumbered ourselves onto the front balcony for a quick attempt at a morning coffee, Keith was set free from his cage... I mean room.

As Jade slowly unlocked the padlocks and removed the cross bars, the excitement mounted.

Eventually a (now) Christmas clothes clad Keith emerged from his room to find huge pile of presents awaiting him...

Well he would have had he not noticed the Thomas running around the tree and just stood there staring at it. After a few minutes, he sat down on Daddy's knee and started to point out all the details on his new Thomas. Eventually, Keith noticed that there were other presents there too..

Keith managed to eat his own bodyweight in lollies. Can I just interrupt the story here to point out just how disgusting modern lollies are? These things could be smelt throughout the rest of the house and were absolutely vial with their synthetic aroma.

That aside, Keith seemed to like them, even more so he seemed to like the gagging sounds and faces that Daddy was making whilst he was trying to escape the awful smell of said lollies. In the end, Keith opened hi presents in shifts, one here, one there, maybe we should all go and have a meal break, open another present and so on.

By the time Keith had opened half his present, Rob and Coral had arrived. Their arrival was somewhat overshadowed by the arrival of Corals famous trifle! This was (obviously) returned as a perfectly empty and clean bowl within a very short time.

After all the usual exchanging of gifts, jokes, and comments about how we'd lost the receipts we all managed to sit down and have a coffee or ten whilst Keith went for a camp.

To sum everything up, we had a perfect Christmas day and slept like really tired corpses that night .

This led us up to Keith's Birthday on the 3rd of January and his party the following Saturday. Rob and Coral arrived, along with most of the Henning kids arrived and brought with them a cast of thousands from Rent A Crowd Pty Ltd. Obviously, whilst the oestrogen party was happening inside, Rob, Matt, Wade, myself and even Keith managed to escape to the safety of the front balcony.

Eventually the female tribe speak died down and everything was in a state of readiness. We all retired to the Dining room for the cutting of the special Train Cake that Jade had made. As well as this, Jade had spent much time on the phone to Coral getting the exact secrets for replicating her trifle and so an even larger trifle was supplied.

Jade, Rob, Keith and I would like to thank you all for your Christmas messages and Keith would really like to thank those of you who sent him extra presents. We all hope you too had a fantastic Christmas as well as a happy New Year and an even happier New Year's Day hangover.

I am pleased to say that the sample for the 1502 mechanism has arrived from North Yard. It is (as we have come to expect from them) brilliant. After testing the mechanism for 19 hours straight, I have fitted the sound unit, fuel tanks and sideframes to the mechanism so it is one step closer to being the latest addition to my fleet of models.

Whilst on the subject of new locos, we are very proud to announce the release of our BRAND NEW Original 1720 class loco shell. These have been designed to be the easiest kit possible to assemble.

They feature a one piece body, complete decals (no more painting stripes) and every casting has been overdetailed as far as possible. I think I am pretty safe in saying that these locos are the next step in QR modelling and should let you see where we are heading.

I will simply let the photos do the talking. We will be releasing the Driver Only Version in the not too distant future as well along with a VERY large number of other new products to be announced soon.