Her - "How's Christmas going?"Ask a woman right now how her Christmas is going and she will almost certainly unfurl her to-do list before your eyes, from the turkey to the costumes for the kids' concerts. They should call it the Season of To-dos. For women, anyway.
Me - "Good! I've got most of the presents done and Christmas is at my mum's this year and she only wants me to do the vegetables. How are you?"
Her - "Oh, terrible, the two little ones still believe and I haven't even started shopping for that plus it's my year to have it so I'm out of my mind trying to get the house clean for the big day. I haven't even got the tree up!"
Me - *soothing clucking noises and a friendly rub on the back.*
"The Catalan republic has beaten the monarchy and article 155. The Spanish state has been beaten. Mr Rajoy and his allies have lost,"Puigdemont said from Brussels where he is hiding from Spanish authorities.
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While the pro-union Citizens Party actually won the election, it did so only by a small margin in terms of vote and share of seats, and is unlikely to form a ruling coalition. Its leader, Ines Arrimadas, lamented that an "unfair" electoral law had given "more seats to those who have fewer votes in the street."
Pro-independence parties, she claimed, "can no longer speak on behalf of everyone" because voters are clearly "in favor of union with Spain" and "for the first time, a unionist party has the elections in Catalonia."
"The Rajoy recipe does not work. Europe must take note," Puigdemont said after the preliminary results of Catalonia's snap election were announced. He also called on Madrid to release all political prisoners. "Now we need to restore democracy, restore our legitimate government, our freedoms. We need to free all those people who are still in prison, but should not be."
"We have maintained the legitimacy and continuity of an institution that was born in 1359. With this legitimacy, we have given news to the world: the Catalan Republic has won. Let them understand it well! Let them take note!"
Last week, the finance ministers of Europe's five biggest economies - Germany, France, the UK, Spain and Italy - wrote an anxious letter to their American colleague, US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, and copied it to all senior Republican politicians in the Congress and Senate.Their letters reportedly "didn't get much of an answer."
The letter's thrust: The draft US tax bill, if passed as written a week ago, would represent a break with global fair-taxation rules as applied to corporations, and represent a thinly disguised form of trade war.
"The United States is Europe's single most important trade and investment partner," the finance ministers wrote. "It is important that the U.S. government's rights over domestic tax policy be exercised in a way that adheres with international obligations to which it has signed-up. The inclusion of certain less conventional international tax provisions could contravene the US's double taxation treaties and may risk having a major distortive impact on international trade."
A day later, a similar letter was sent to Mnuchin by the European Commission's four most senior economic officials and made many of the same points.
Comment: Another company to add to the list. Question is whether these savings will continue to be passed on to their employees further down the road.