Either there really is a problem with the post, or we have been forsaken by our friends. Our Christmas card display so far this year is pitiful.

If it hadn't been for our financial adviser, a mail-order catalogue company I once used, and our own parents, our mantelpiece would be bereft of seasonal greetings.

Perhaps our hi-tech friends have lost our address - electronic organisers are notoriously unreliable.

Or maybe we're about to be flooded by hand deliveries. The awful alternative, oh it makes me shudder to think, is that we have upset our chums and have been struck off their lists. And once you're off, you rarely get back on.

I've been racking my brain to remember who I may have inadvertently insulted during the past year.

I have occasionally mentioned friends in this column and, for some reason, they have been absolutely livid.

One hasn't yet forgiven me for describing her daughter's hands as chubby. My friend Lizzie is still cross that I didn't point out in a recent column that she had her singing fish years before the Prime Minister was given his.

At least these people have aired their grievances. What about the rest? I suspect my husband is partly to blame. He has been very rude to all the cat owners we know.

Sending each other cards is a funny old business anyway, don't you think? I start panicking at this time of year because it's taken as some measure of your popularity if every inch of your living room is covered in smiling Santas and Gary Larson cartoons.

But I do think it's a bit silly to give them to people I see every day - even though I still end up doing it. And as for those I don't see from one year to the next, but in whose cards I still write "must get together in the New year", well, it's just another seasonal lie. I'm sure some friendships probably work best as once-a-year communications.

Talking of which, we've got a few distant acquaintances who send us their annual personal Christmas newsletter with their card.

These are usually in the format of two typed pages of A4 paper and contain accounts of their recent expeditions up the Limpopo, the results of their Open University degree in organic physics and the fact that "baby number five is on its way". I find it slightly offensive. Have I got time to read all that? Why don't they phone up and ask me about my life?

I suppose we could get our own back and produce our own newsletter, but I wouldn't want to risk losing any more friends.

If the postman doesn't come laden with envelopes for us in the next few days, I shall be putting Plan B into action.

I dug out a few of last year's cards with the intention of giving them the Blue Peter treatment and turning them into gift tags.

But now I'm thinking of putting them up. I've convinced myself it's not a crime.