By Wednesday last week, I was done with my Christmas shopping, which means I avoided run-ins with crowds doing their last-minute shopping these past few days.

Perhaps my brief shopping spree had a lot to do with me getting over that whole business of new dress, shoes and God knows what else people buy to show off at the Christmas service.

The fact that I was invited to spend Christmas with friends also helped, more so because I don’t exactly have a family here expecting Christmas goodies.

Being spared that chaos and anxiety is heaven I tell you. All I had to do was focus on packing for my trip. Dear Lord, I need more Christmases like this. If only every one around the world was in good spirits. The 1,000 plus who were swept away by overnight floods in the Philippines come to mind. I feel guilty that our lives are going on while across the Atlantic, many bodies have to be buried in mass graves because no one has claimed them, more likely because entire families were swept away as they slept. Heartbreaking is all I can say.

The other high profile death that’s rattling almost all the "superpowers” is that of former North Korean President, Kim Jong-il. The man’s dead for crying out loud and I actually think all the speculation about what his successor will or won’t do will just play in the already overhyped North-Korean’s favour. On a lighter note, and not to be insensitive in anyway, I’m still trying to figure out exactly why he was called the "Dear” leader. When you host lavish champagne and lobster parties when your countrymen are starving, that doesn’t make you dear in my opinion. I was also struck by images of those mourning him.

Women and especially men crying buckets! Honestly, I didn’t buy any of it. That PR machine sure knows its job. Onto more serious stuff, Bashar al-Assad! How insolent can a man be? Out of touch can’t even begin to describe him. Gaddafi surely died in vain because all these self-serving dictators haven’t learnt a single lesson. I see Assad, not in a meat cooler but the worst jail in Syria, stripped of all his ill-gotten wealth and freedoms just as he has stripped the Syrian people of theirs. My hope is that the US, Arab League and anyone else who wants Assad out, do more than just "observing” and condemning the Assad regime, otherwise more people will die.

I know it’s Christmas and I should be writing about more merry stuff but at the same time, you can’t just sweep all the gloom and doom under the carpet, can you? For anti-racist activists like myself, Luis Suarez’s eight-match ban is a welcome Christmas present. I may be a Liverpool fan but I’m letting Suarez walk this one alone. In fact I think he should have got more. These are millionaires many times over and a few thousand pounds in fines is nothing to them. Perhaps a life ban would send a stronger message and get us closer to a racism-free world. John Terry is next. Never really liked him anyway since he cheated on his wife, which is really none of my business but the point I’m trying to make is that it’s a shame he’s still England’s captain. I hope this time next year, we will all be more accepting and tolerant of people who don’t look or talk like us.

To be continued…