The past few days

We've had an eventful past few days. Last Friday, we had Little A and J
come to stay with us for the day, as usual. Unfortunately, A started
to be sick from time to time, throwing up her drinks and food, and later
on her brother started to do the same, though he remained reasonably well.
So we had a lot of clearing up, while giving TLC to these two young ones,
until their mum arrived to take them home (at the end of her working day).

To backtrack briefly, we went to a lovely concert by the carol singers of
Nottingham's St Mary's Church. The standard of the singing was very high ...
as good as if not better than Kings College Choir (in Cambridge). We
bought a CD of their more popular carols, which we listened too while
putting yesterday's dinner together. Listening to carols being sung by
the Kings College Choir at Christmas was one of our family's traditions
while I was growing up. We never went to church, but we liked the music,
and for me it was all part of the magic of Christmas ... a really special
time for our family. My dad was less grumpy than usual, even though his
birthday was at Christmas.

On Saturday, the highlight of the day .... was not "The X Factor". Nope,
Mrs C and I went round for a dinner and fun with rellies who live up the
hill from us. We had what was more or less a Xmas dinner without the
turkey, as they're vegetarian. Mrs C brought with us a lovely lemon
drizzle cake she'd made earlier in the day, plus extra goodies for the
pudding, and we drank lots of wine and Cava. Dee-licious.

The fun- side of the get-together was playing with the children's Wii,
and after a few practice throws I got quite good at ten-pin bowling.
It looks quite a simple game, but the complexity of the hardware and
software underlying it is mind-boggling. I thought it was good for
social interaction too, as it got the conversation going between all of
us. Later on we got into a board game, we've played occasionally in the
past ... "The Settlers of Catan", which like "Monopoly" can take up to
two hours to get through one game if you've got 4 or 5 players. We
enjoyed playing this one too.

Yesterday, we spent part of the morning doing some Xmas and food
shopping in town, and the rest of the day, catching up on TV programmes
like "The X Factor", "Have I got news for you", "Live at The Apollo"
with Rob Brydon, part one of a drama "Small Island" (based on Andrea
Levy's book), "Come Dine With Me", a night in with the nation's
sweetheart, Cheryl Cole, followed by another helping of "The X Factor",
the Final, with guest appearances from George Michael & Sir Paul
McCartney singing one of my Beatles favourites: "Drive My Car".
Of course the two finalists, Joe and Olly, were brilliant, and
deserved to be where they were. I think they've both got good
career prospects of making it in show business, Joe in particular,
as I think he's got the "cute" factor. His singing of "Sorry Seems
To Be" was stunning ... it's a very difficult song to sing ~ I know,
as I've tried to sing it myself.

Oh, and we also managed to write most of our Xmas cards for this year,
a greatly reduced number, as I'll be sending out an e-card to most
people on our list instead, with a personalised Xmas message to
everyone too.