Over the last year or so Skype's done a lot to improve call quality, and it's great when other people notice the difference too (and here too).

How does this relate to Christmas? Well, the first line of the traditional Christmas song, The Twelve Days of Christmas, certainly seems the least logical, but I suspect that it's just a case of Chinese whispers.

'Partridge' in French is perdrix, pronounced 'perdree', and you can see that it wouldn't take much to corrupt this to 'pear tree'. There are other theories involving the ancient Greek king Perdrix, who with Athena had connections to the pear tree, but given that the 'three calling birds' who we'll be visiting later almost certainly started out as 'colley birds' or blackbirds, so it'd be unsurprising if people had got the first line wrong too.

With the improvements made over the course of 2007 I hope your calls will have been crisper and clearer — but that doesn't mean we've stopped working. And while it's great to see more and more people giving our call quality the thumbs-up, that doesn't mean it can't be even better. Please keep reporting any problems you encounter, and of course we won't complain if you blog about things when they're working well

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