Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Please put 1,800 pennies in pie-man's hat. You'll need to order a large t-shirt to fit your unusually corpulent goose.

You don't seem to need much reminding, but we thought we'd labour the point anyway: t-shirts make excellent Christmas presents. If you order this week, we can be pretty sure of getting it to you before the postal system goes into meltdown. After that, your guess is as good as ours.

While you're counting out your pennies, feast your eyes on this vision of loveliness. We ordered an early Christmas present for our staff the other day in the shape of 14 excellent pies from the lovely people at pieminister. And that was straight after we'd tasted a rather splendid pie from Lime Tree Pantry. Reviews to follow shortly, once we can all breathe properly again.

The balance of nature has been maintained perfectly this month, in that just as one lot of friends contacted us, another lot vanished off the radar. The new howies catalogue dropping onto the doormat is always a moment of joy and excitement at pie-man towers, and their autumn/winter one is a corker. However the flipside is that PIE's website has disappeared without trace. Surely such a titan of the pie firmament cannot have hung up its baking trays for good? If anyone has a phone number for them or any details, please let us know.