IT'S THAT time of year when your whole life passes in front of your eyes. Yes, it's Christmas card list time, that annual lurch down Memory Lane.

It starts with people you went to school with, through college, first job, to that nice couple you met on holiday and with whom you shared far too many bottles of Rioja. There are distant cousins, old colleagues and probably women you met at ante-natal classes. Once you've compared stretch marks, that's a bond for life.

There are two approaches to Christmas cards. The one is ordered and ruthless and crosses people off when you haven't seen them for a year or two, or have no wish to see them ever again. Very sensible.

Then there's the chaos theory... This is where you keep sending cards to people you possibly haven't seen since you played in the sandpit together, the ones whose lives you know about only by the names - or lack of them - at the bottom of the card. For many of us who've moved from job to job and city to city, the address books bulges. Every year sees another wodge of friends and colleagues added to the list until the number of cards gets so vast that you think you MUST stop some of them. Of course, that would be sensible.

And yet...

It's only a card, but it keeps lines of communication open. These people were your friends once. There's a good chance you might be friends again. Why throw that chance away for the sake of a card? Who knows, one day you might actually arrange that drink/coffee/lunch and re-discover why you were friends in the first place.

We all go through stages of our lives when we are absorbed by our own lives, jobs and families. But one day we'll surface again and want and need our friends. Making new friends gets harder as you get older. Seems foolish to have flung the old ones away with the Christmas card list.

Christmas is no time to be mean-spirited. So if you are dithering about whether to send a card to someone you haven't seen for years, go mad and risk it. You have nothing to lose but a stamp - and the chance of a reunion with old friends.

GOOD news. Thanks to a major fund-raising drive last month, sufferers in this region from a painful skin condition could now have two specialist nurses.

Butterfly Children, whose skin is as fragile as a butterfly's wing, have to be covered from top to toe in special bandages and cling film. Even a cuddle is agony for them.

There are only two specialist nurses in the country, both based in Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

A special fund-raising campaign last month by DEBRA, the charity involved in researching cures, and Forever Living Products, makers of Aloe Vera Propolis Creme, currently undergoing clinical trials for use with butterfly children, hoped to raise £50,000 to fund a nurse in the north of England for two years.

But so far the appeal has raised well over £80,000 and has been extended until the end of this month in confident hopes of making £100,000.

"That would be enough for two nurses for two years," says Ben Andriessen of Ramshaw, an independent distributor for FLP. "It's really good news."

So thank you very much everyone. And if anyone would like to add their bit to that total, then contact Ben on 01388 834803.

DESPITE the strong concerns of pharmacists who will have the responsibility of selling it, the morning after pill will go on sale over the counter sale in the New Year.

Four questions:

1. Are there any REAL safeguards preventing it being sold to under 16s?

2. Are there any REAL safeguards preventing a young girl using it two, three, four times in a year?

3. Does anyone know what the long-term effects of such use would be?

4. As long as it reduces the number of teenage pregnancies, does anyone really care?

A new survey says that one in five people gets seriously stressed at Christmas.

One in five? Is that ALL?

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/news/griffiths.html