Over the past two months I have been writing a Christmas story. It is about Santa Claus and the remarkable sequence of events that befell a young girl living on the edge of the rainforest in Palawan, a tropical island where I live.
Of course, for such an apparently far fetched story, it was important to check out the facts. That was easy to do here in Palawan, but how could I interview somebody quite so famous as Santa Claus, who lived far away in a land where I would freeze to death as soon as I got off the airplane?
Well, it turned out to be more easy than I thought, and we met, believe it or not, close to a big firework display in Southern England on November 5th 2005. How I got there and how he got there, I am not allowed to say. In fact, I cannot say, simply because I do not know for sure. I can only speculate. My passport shows I was here; my wife tells me I was here; I tell myself I was here. But I was there, and this is what I can report from the notes I took at the interview. There was much more, but I am sworn to secrecy, and Santa Claus has such amazing powers, I would not go against his wishes.
These are the 3 questions, and answers, I am...