As did the wonderful surge in BFPO mail, both from families and from complete strangers.
Indeed! Upstairs at KKIA the postal folk had pinned up dozens of letters from total strangers which were a delight to read. We also had quite a few (mustn't-call-it-Christmas) cakes. But Mr Kipling not only made exceedingly good mince pies, but effing thousands of them - we had walls of them in the tanker QRA hotel annex. If we had visitors we'd offer them as many boxes as they could carry with them!
RAF catering was very good. So good that the Army banned its troops from using it as otherwise their own cooks wouldn't have any work to do.
I'd gone back to do some Sky Guardian and HaveQuick 2 work during a 2 week break, as well as some fighter evasion stuff in the VC10K simulator. We didn't have fill-gun loading of MWODs for the HQ2, so the codes all had to be loaded manually, which was a complete faff. When the security people heard that the MWOD codes had been freely photocopied for distribution they nearly fainted. Not that we really had any option; few crews seemed to understand HaveQuick or be bothered to learn about it - but fortunately we never experienced comms jamming, so didn't really need to use it.
Regarding Mode4, it worked just fine as far as were concerned in the VC10K. But were still required to do periodic Mode 1 and Mode 3 code changing - no clever automatic device required, just a cheap Muharraq souk watch pressed against the headset ear piece which beeped at the required interval!