The Great Outdoors

After the transformation of our back garden at the end of last year from tattered wilderness to outdoor designer living space, we've watched with eager anticipation as the lengthening days have worked their magic on the dormant twigs and anonymous clumps of leaves that were planted last November. By yesterday, when we gave our new barbecue and patio furniture their first trial run, it was looking like this:

Neither of us is, by any stretch of the imagination, a plant expert, but even so there are some instantly recognisable and welcome plants in the borders. Two varieties of poppy (I love poppies) - one a deep orange with single flowers; the other redder with frilly edges to the blooms. By request we have several rhododendrons, yet to come into their full glory, a couple of clematis beginning their long climb up a pair of obelisks (out of picture to the left in the shot above) and two roses - a pink bush beside the bird feeder and this one:

which will eventually trail over the lych gate at the bottom of the garden. These were joined last week by a new specimen whose buds are currently holding on tightly to the secret of their colour. It's planted on the right of the arbour seat (behind the camera in the first shot above but visible in the pond shot below) and will eventually frame the whole structure with colour.

Since the main garden work was completed too late to plant up the pond, it remained barren until last week when another truck load of plants arrived for the front garden. At long last the frogs who have taken up residence in the intervening months will have somewhere to hide from the marauding heron who occasionally visits to check whether the pond has developed any fish.

At present these new plants are still on the sparse side, but it won't be long before they've filled out a bit. We've started with three or four dwarf rushes and two small lilies and we'll see how we get on with those before adding more. I always think a pond should have some water visible as well as the plants.

As for the rest of the garden, well much of it is still a mystery since apart from a few requests, we gave the designer and the landscaper free rein. We're hoping to recognise more favourites as the year wears on and other things come into bloom.

On the other side of the house, the front garden has been a work in progress for much of this year, since we had an early hiccup with the design. But now it's almost complete, bar the pyramid capstones on the new front gate pillars. Planting was only completed on Friday so everything is still looking very new, young, and unestablished, but this photo gives a hint of what it will be like.

It's North facing, so we were limited with plant selection. Our designer recommended a "green and cream" theme, both because cream and white flowers will lift the gloom of the almost sunless garden, and also because they're the ones that do best in positions with low sun. We did insist on a ceanothus though, having seen a fabulous specimen on a recent trip to Oxford, and we've positioned it where it catches what bit of sun the front garden gets, but where we can still see it from the house.

FuruTankee

Hot on the heels of yesterday's post, where I claimed "KaraTankee" might mean empty tank, we have FuruTankee. Because Google translate is my friend, and tells me that the Japanese for full is "furu".

The only thing it's not full of, is fish. We have plants, we have rocks (the black pebbles that have recently seen service in the BiUbe, the spare piece of ocean rock that I bought to address the acidity problem, but didn't have room for, and a nifty little moulded pile of rubble from those nice people at Fluval), we have a heater, and we have an assembled filter with its input strainer in place.

It all hums along very nicely. Armed with her 'A' Level physics - far more recent than mine - Nat calculates it will take about 15 hours to heat the water up to 24°C. That'll be tomorrow then.

That's when the process of "cycling" the tank will start in earnest, with the addition of a tasty mix of ammonia, old filter squeezings and a bit of rock from the old tank. Yum!

Hare today

Having taxied back to Chesterfield from Friday's nuptials, yesterday morning was largely taken up with breakfasting and then heading off in one car to pick up the other two (the logistics of which are fairly simple compared to some of the stunts we've pulled in the Lakes).

Neither vehicle had come to any harm during their enforced stay in the pub car park, and duly retrieved, we set off for an afternoon's amble around Chatsworth gardens, taking in the general ambience and enjoying some of the unusual sculptures that adorn the gardens at the moment as part of their "Beyond Limits" exhibition.

I christened this one "Hare On My Bell End" - for obvious reasons. Never did find out what it's really called, and as it's not mentioned over here or on the "sculpture map" I'm still none the wiser. Maybe it's a permanent feature.

Anyway having indulged in more ice cream and pasties than were entirely good for us, we returned to P&V's place (via the Robin Hood for a quick quaff) to refresh before wandering over to the Market Pub for a couple of extra pints in advance of dinner at The Old Post. And WHAT a dinner. Superb.

All too soon the evening, and this morning's breakfast, with such charming and erudite companions was over and we returned home to examine what progress had been made, kitchen-wise in our absence on Friday afternoon, which was - as I'm sure you'll realise if you've been following - "Kitchen fit: Day 5".

The answer was "not a lot" - certainly nothing that would be visible in a photo. The guys had been concentrating on completing the essential and fiddly bits that aren't especially noticeable, while staying out of the way of the granite men. Expect more obvious progress tomorrow.

Simple Things

Stress. There's been a lot of it around lately. After a blissful couple of months following the last round of construction where not very much was happening (although the thought of the Large Decorating Project loomed... er... large), things have been hotting up both at work and at home.

I don't often write much about work. There's a few reasons. I hate it. It's government work, so I can't really give much away in any case. And it bores me, so I always assume it would bore the heck out of you too. But in recent weeks we've been reaching the end of an 18-month project and that means... it's RELEASE TIME. Anyone who has ever worked on a computing project will recognise the stress involved, as all the designs become real, all the bugs are flushed out and run scurrying around the place before they're stamped on by the right fix, and all the managers call endless review meetings and micro-manage the hell out of us to make themselves feel better about approaching deadlines and growing bug counts.

And us architects and designers scratch our heads and wonder why on Earth it is behaving like THAT when our designs say it should behave like THIS.

On the home front - well, more about that later - but Other Projects have been occupying us there too, so between looking forward to the weekends all week, and then spending all weekend on Projects, it's all go go go.

Unlike the totally unreasonable Work Managers, who demand more and more from less and less, I am blessed with a wonderful Home Manager. Nikki makes sure amid the hustle and bustle of home improvements that we always enjoy some down time at the weekend. Even when we're working to a deadline we can always take time out for a nice meal, watch a movie, and relax in the evenings. Even when we have to go shopping (yuk!) we grab a breakfast panini and a coffee at Starbuck's. She makes it fun, whatever we're doing, so it's never a chore.

There's one more thing that I find helps to de-stress me in these cold, wintry months of short days and dark mornings. A simple, natural thing. Bird song in the morning.

When I was a kid I lived a few minutes walk away from a small copse. The remnant of a larger wood that had mostly been cleared to make way for housing in the late 40s/early 50s, the copse covered only about an acre, but was full of mature trees, well-worn mud paths, the odd "secret" clearing and an abundance of wildlife. I used to love walking there on summer days, with the sunlight shooting luminous con-trails through the canopy and the birds chattering and peeping from the treetops and bushes.

The first time we viewed this house, I was immediately attracted by the huge trees all around. They support a healthy population of the usual British garden birds - finches, tits, sparrows, etc - as well as a large number of magpies and woodpigeons. We have occasionally spotted something a little more exotic - a woodpecker or a sparrowhawk - but it's the common birds kicking up their morning chorus that I love. All that bickering and calling back and forth takes me back to those boyhood days in the copse and puts a smile on my face to start the day.

Finding amusement in simple things

I wouldn't dare to claim that I never feel grumpy (at least, not on a post with open comments), but I have always been able to find amusement in small things. I think it's a gift, being able to find something to smile or laugh about in even the darkest times, and it helps to lift a humdrum day out of the ordinary and into the sublime, even if only just into. It's a small glimmer of the kind of spirit that kept the Chilean miners going, and helps most of us get through the boring work day. Without it, we would be that other kind of people. The kind who growl and scowl their way through life, determined to look on the black side and make everyone else endure that black side too. The kind you find on, say, the London Underground.

With one massive decorating project ahead of me, and about a dozen smaller "finishing off" jobs still hanging over from earlier projects, we've been to B&Q for the last two Saturdays on the run. Exactly the kind of mundane trip that provides the opportunity to exercise a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous.

First visit we were amused to notice that someone had been at the sticky letters (those you might use, for instance, to spell out your house name if you were pretentious enough to have a named house - although obviously not that pretentious if you were considering naming it with sticky letters) and had rearranged the first row of letters to spell C O C K.

On our second visit - last Saturday - one of the things on the list was a black bucket to replace the one I'd "lent" to the builders and never got back. It's the kind of thing that - being not electrical, or illuminatory, or woody, or decorative, or (particularly) gardeny - doesn't have a natural home among the labyrinthine shelves, so we scoured the aisles for several minutes looking for them... in vain. We then repeated our aisle-scouring activities in the hope of finding a B&Q operative of whom we could enquire the location of the buckets. Rounding a corner into the very last aisle, we spotted a group of three operatives enjoying a cosy chat. They were standing next to a large pile of black plastic buckets.

Watching plaster dry

It sounds like it should be as boring as watching paint dry, but I can tell you watching plaster dry is much more interesting than that. Every time I walk into the room, the pattern of damp has changed. Receded. It's fascinating, in its own way, and every centimetre of changing colour, from the deep maroony-brown of wet plaster to the clear shining almost-alabaster aspect of dry, brings us that much closer to the day when painting can start. Which, according to my plan, will be Friday.

Yes, I have a plan. We don't want to be camping out in the study for any longer than we can help, so to bring the schedule in in the minimum time requires that things like radiator and carpet fitting are booked in advance, which it turn means we need to know when the wall painting will be complete (for the rad) and when the woodwork will all be done (for the carpet).

Still, no photos yet. I may be sad enough to get some small frisson of excitement from a visibly decreasing patch of damp wall, but I wouldn't dream of suggesting you are too :o)

Stop worrying

The "Quote of the Day" widget on my Google homepage regularly gives me a smile. Occasionally a laugh. All too rarely it delivers something so appropriate, so timely, all I can do is listen to the sound of my jaw dropping while I sit immobilised at the keyboard.

Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.
-George Iles

So I'll stop worrying that I'm 53 years old and I still live in a house where half the rooms (including our bedroom) have no carpet. Where half-completed construction projects shed their dust (it's a SIN!) over the entire house. Where my tools litter the study floor alongside the disassembled pieces of that rim latch I was saving for when I repair the door on the spare room. Where the attic is stuffed with things of almost no perceptible value, which I can't bring myself to chuck out in case someone will offer me a few measly quid for them on eBay.

Assuming I ever got around to listing them there.

It used to scare me - a little - how much this house resembles the digs I had as a student. It's even in the same road (albeit the nicer end, I tell myself). But, you know, it's a home. I like it. Love it, actually. And it does get better, slowly. Or "at my own pace" as I prefer to put it.

It's a place where there's always time for a laugh, or a cup of tea. Time for a leisurely breakfast, a game of Buzz, or a movie. And where I never need to feel pressured to DO anything, or guilty that I haven't.

Yeah. In the words of a popular icon from my youth: "What, me worry?"

Google and Pac-Man

Google's "doodles" - the changes to their logo they make every so often to celebrate some national or international event, holiday, or hot news topic - have quickly become legendary. In fact one of the only complaints I have with the iGoogle home page is that we never see any indication that there's a new doodle to enjoy.

Last weekend, two legends collided. It was the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, widely regarded as "the game that started it all" (even though, being first released in 1980, it trailed Space Invaders by two years), and in celebration Google installed its first fully interactive doodle - a working copy of Pac-Man with the maze spelling out "Google" and whose gameplay faithfully reproduced the original, including ghost behaviours, fruits, and even the original bug that corrupts the screen on the 256th level.

Media coverage suggests that the game didn't start playing unless you pressed the Insert Coin button (which temporarily replaced the usual "I'm Feeling Lucky"), but this certainly wasn't true for me. Maybe it's different on Chrome, but the game started right up after a short delay and I reached instinctively for the arrow keys (I was a huge Pac-Man fan) and began playing immediately. I reached the fifth level, which I was pretty pleased about given that I haven't played for, like, 20 years. Some things never leave you.

But celebrating Pac-Man's 30th birthday, and Google's inventiveness and sense of fun, is only part of the reason for this post. And it's the "sense of fun" angle that I'd like to concentrate on first, because to me that's what it was all about. It was a weekend, Google's doodles are a fine tradition that always raise a smile in our house, and this particular doodle gave Google's users the chance - briefly - to relive a much-loved time in their youth when it was OK to while away a few hours chasing an animated cartoon mouth around a maze.

So it was with a dawning sense of OMG that I read some of the 571 comments posted on the news article I found on the subject. Many of them mirrored my own reaction ("wow" "cool" "brings back memories" etc) but fully half of them were complaints about the noise, about the intrusion into their browser space, about the waste of time and money, and any other possible thing you could think of to complain about and even some that would never occur to most people I know. Incredible.

These comments drew stinging reactions from the supporters of Google's efforts, as you'd expect, with people pointing out variously that Google (and all its services) is free, that doodles are only ever up for a day (or two at most), that all computers are equipped with a "mute" function, and that in the end if they weren't happy, why didn't these people just close their browsers or navigate to another page? But all of that common sense couldn't hide the fact that there are vast numbers of people out there who have utterly lost their sense of humour, of fun, and of celebration. And what's worse, they're not even prepared to sit quietly while those of us who haven't lost those things get on with it.

It gets worse.

Someone who must recently have had a humourectomy has now calculated the world-wide LOSS OF PRODUCTIVITY that the Pac-Man doodle caused. Yep. Five million man hours, apparently, giving a total monetary value - based on a low-to-average U.S. salary - of $120 million. A figure arrived at using some broadly-drawn assumptions on the amount of time usually spent on the Google home page versus the amount of time spent there when the Pac-Man doodle was active.

Oh dear. Oh woe is me. For a few extra seconds, all over the world, people weren't making money. Strike us all down with a bolt of lightning. Good grief. One of the saddest aspects of "this modern world" which has crept up on us during those thirty years since Pac-Man arrived, is that too many people have forgotten there is more to life than making money. Lift your heads up from those desks, people. Take your noses from the grindstone for a few precious minutes and have some fun ffs.

Making do with instant

Major and ongoing disturbance to sleep patterns has its advantages. For a long time now, one or other of us has been waking up between 5 and 5.30 - occasionally even earlier - and not being able to get back to sleep. Not having to leave until 7.30 to take Nikki to work, such an early rise time translates into a 2-hour morning stint at the puter and - the real bonus - enough time to enjoy a pot of real coffee.

The downside is flaking out in front of the TV by 8.30, the consequent early bedtime, and an inevitable early wake-up again. It's a vicious circle, I tell you!

But guess what? Something even more vicious? The one day in - what? 20? 30? - that we do manage to stay asleep until the alarm kicks in at 6.30, means there's only time for one cup of (instant) coffee. And when you've been used to savouring two mugs of delicious Java fresh from the cafetière, that really bites.

Doodle Do

Breakfast table conversations can have the strangest consequences. A couple of weeks ago we were discussing the old DoodleArt posters of the 70s and 80s, and how I used to have one tacked up on the wall of my flat. I spent many a happy evening totally focussed on colouring in my alien landscape in those simple days.

Cue Nikki's razor-sharp Internet search skills, and the uncovering of the wonderful world of Wildergorn. I was enthused! I ordered three posters. One (Watergorn - of which this is a small detail) for myself and one each for the girls.

I couldn't find their recommended pens for colouring - Stabilo 68 fibre tips - at anything like a decent discount from any online retailer, so I bid on a full set from eBay and won, at a saving of almost fifteen quid.

Once all the breakfasting and household chores were out of the way today, I rolled the 27" x 40" poster out on the dining table and set to. Pretty soon I was just as immersed in the detailed world of harpies, water and stone as I had been all those years ago on Planet Zog. A perfect way to relax on a drab winter Saturday, when there's no colour at all in the world outside, but 40 vibrant colours to choose from in my little tin box.

Mullington Crescent

Our fourth mulled wine evening was a smaller affair than in previous years. We never ask for an RSVP, but this time round a majority of the houses on the street weren't represented. Just one of those things I guess. It's a busy time of year and folk have many calls on their time.

Still, it was nice that word got back to us via various roundabout routes that those who did attend enjoyed themselves. We certainly did. It's not really a lot of effort to mull a few pints of wine and put a small selection of nibbles into well-distributed dishes. And at least "small and intimate" meant we got to bed at a reasonable hour, rather than the 3am finishes which have been the norm in the past.

Perspectives

Into each life a little rain must fall. An old, trite phrase that, like all old, trite phrases contains a kernel of truth. Everyone has their own shit to deal with; their own bucket to carry; etc. Parents always tell you that they'll never stop worrying about you, and that you won't understand how they feel until you have children of your own. And then, when you have children of your own... yes. You understand. With a depth of understanding that sits somewhere below bone-deep. In a subterranean cavern of the soul that you didn't really know existed.

And you watch your children dealing with their shit - that small proportion of it that they're prepared to share with you, or you learn about indirectly - and wish that you could help them with it. And know that you can't. Worse than that, sometimes, someheartbreakingtimes that stay with you in a way you know you'll never shake off, you're the cause of the rain that fell into their lives. Rain? It was more like a fireman's hose, with your hand on the valve.

Which is why these days we like to try and make our home a haven of shitlessness. Dump your shit at the door, no shit here thank you. That's not to say we don't have "serious conversations" - just that we like to try and resolve more problems than we cause, and generally accentuate the positive. But sometimes, being a parent, I worry (see above) that it all gets a bit boring here. Cos, you know, we don't really do much most of the time (apart from the odd trip here and there). The weekend days generally have a beat to them - lazy breakfast; do our own thing for a few hours; pot of tea with optional snacks; movie; dinner; evening telly usually followed by another movie - but is it ENOUGH?

This morning, in a rare shaft of sunlight that shone into that dark cavern I was talking about, I discovered that maybe it's more than enough. Maybe it's exactly right. I happened across this answer in one of Blythe's online quizzes. (I hope this doesn't count as 'parental surveillance' but hey - if it's on t'Internet it's public domain, right?)

Were you happy when you woke up today?
Yes, because it was the weekend, I could hear my sister coming out of the car and through the front gate, and I was at my dads. Being at my dads is like therapy; I get away, literally as far as I can, from everything thats currently happening. It's like a small two day holiday every two weeks.

As you might imagine, that cheered me right up! So that's why this post is called 'perspectives'. Because things always look different depending on who's doing the looking, and because you don't often know the effect what you do has on others, even those closest to you, and even when you think you're not doing much.

Can there be anything more satisfying...

...than sitting in one's study while working, and hearing the strains of one of your favourite albums of all time coming up from downstairs, because it's being listened to by your daughters?

Well, I'm sure you have your own list of "most satisfying moments," but this *definitely* qualifies as one of mine.

It's like... passing on the baton of prog rock enjoyment to the next generation. What a pity there are so few contemporary bands with the musical prowess of those great 70s icons to create new stuff that's equally as good.

*waits patiently for the denizens of bothbarson to hotly contest that last point*

Incinerate!

With several things on our garden-related shopping list today and Mr Weatherman promising heavy rain later, we made an early start and took breakfast at the garden centre this morning. The bacon baps and toasted teacakes were excellent, so this may become a semi-regular thing (constrained only by the slight ache in the wallet caused by paying £5.25 for a bacon bap).

No visit to Woodford is complete without a full tour of the grounds, so along with the planned purchases of an incinerator, a fat snax holder for the bird feeder, and some rooting compound, we ended up with a trolley full of goodies including this rather attractive dianthus which now graces the deck, and a compact patio clematis (down there on the right) whose colour might have been especially bred to match the tub vacated by our dogwood, which we planted out in the border the weekend before last.

I left all the planting and arranging to Nikki. My attention was focused on man things. Assembling the incinerator (a rather grand title for the simple task of screwing its three feet on) and getting started with the burning.

I've had a lifelong fascination with fire, almost to the point of pyromania. It explains the large, strangely shaped scar on my right hand, and manifested itself when I was a child in hours spent in the woods collecting fallen branches, building bonfires and watching them burn. And then returning to the embers the following Saturday to rake them back into life and begin the whole process over again.

Using a garden incinerator isn't quite as satisfying as that - having to wait until the wood has burned down before adding more slows the whole process down too much - but it comes a close second. In the end the promised rain didn't arrive and I was able to keep the fire going from noon until late afternoon, reducing the stack of oily floorboards by about a third and seeing off the various lengths of pruned tree completely.

In the intervals between loading wood into the bin, and picking up the odd smoking remnant that fell out, I busied myself collecting bricks from the site and stacking them by the wall, along with sorting the multitude of detritus that litters the area into piles of keepers and chuckers.

After four hours the air holes in our shiny new incinerator were totally blocked with ash, which had built up to more than half fill the bin. This slowed down the rate of burn considerably. It wasn't shiny any more either. The galvanising, or whatever had given it that shiny appearance, had all burned off within the first five minutes. I waited until the fuel level dropped below the rim, slotted the chimneyed lid into place, and left the rest of the burning for another day.

Last day

Last day of May, and the last day of our holiday sadly. We spent another few hours in the garden clearing the border, which is now looking pretty darn good and makes the garden appear much wider. There's a couple of metres of clearance still to do - probably another day's work - at which point the whole of the left-hand side will be done.

Since this represents our entire plan for the garden this year I think it's safe to say we're ahead of schedule and we might start thinking about clearing the bottom border, building a raised bed, or even planting some rhododendrons (all in the plan for Year 2), and the discovery that New Plumber knows someone who can demolish cement asbestos garages, introduced the possibility of bringing that item forward from Year 3!

Still not quite Capability Brown standard but for two non-gardeners we've surprised ourselves with how much fun it's been.

With the hottest part of the day approaching we decamped to our nice cool lounge to watch the last five episodes of The Wire (Season 2). Even better than the first, and it's now easy to see why this is such a cult programme. Season 3 starts on BBC Two on June 15 and we can't wait.

Down day

We had nothing planned for today barring the inevitable patching up of those areas of paint that hadn't *quite* managed to remain solid with a single coat. No matter how hard I try I can never completely cover an area on the first attempt, except for that one abortive attempt to use 'Once' - or whatever that paint is called that is supposedly able to cover in one coat - paint so thick that you can hardly drag it out of the tin and with which the brush strokes dry in place to taunt you forever. Never again.

So I picked Nat up early from her place, set to with the roller and brush, and had everything finished early, leaving us time for a tasty visit to The Bar for a late lunch and pint, after which we headed Yorkshirewards to collect Blythe. Nat and Paul came with me, which made for a more interesting trip, with the time passing more quickly than usual owing to the excellent company.

Dinner was Thai noodles cooked by Blythe in her food tech class, and most excellent they were too. Even though at first sight I was convinced there wasn't enough for five people, the portion sizes proved to be spot on - those noodles with peanut sauce were very filling!

All in all, for a day in which nothing much really happened, I ended up feeling very relaxed, positive and happy, which after all is what holidays are all about innit?

Mulled but not dulled

Our traditional mulled wine party was graced with family this year, as not only my elder daughter but also my cousin and her husband came over for the occasion.

So we had a kind of ante-party from about 5pm onwards, with a lot of delightful chat, catching up, and few sandwiches and nibbles before I set about mulling the wine shortly after 7pm. Things were slightly more confused than usual, since over the years we have gradually accumulated three varieties of mulling spices, each with their own discrete instructions. The first, and the one we've used in each of the last two years, requires a bottle of wine to half a bottle of water (only we use three bottles of wine to get the party started, naturally, and top up throughout the evening as the guests arrive with another bottle or eight).

The second box of spices, which we expected to have to break into this year, suggests a bottle of wine to a third of a bottle of water (75/25cl). And finally the box which we procured last year from the Northwest Fine Food Festival and are not expecting to have to use until next year, suggests using no water whatever.

Now I'm in the habit of refilling everyone's cup/mug/glass as soon as they become empty, so I opted for the first (i.e. the tried and trusted) recipe. I like to see my guests merry, but I don't want to impose a raging red-wine headache on anyone!

As last year, the first guests arrived at 8.10, and a handful of others drifted in between then and 9.30, by which time I was beginning to feel a little disappointed at the turnout. We'd had notice of no-shows from two couples, and fully expected one other couple to turn up in halves, as they have very young children to look after, but as for the rest...? I'd almost decided it wasn't worth lighting the oven - there was no way we could get through 100 hot Indian party nibbles with the numbers we'd had up to then - when virtually the whole of the rest of the street turned up in the space of 15 minutes.

Just goes to show you never need to worry about parties. They always turn out alright. Especially round here, where mulled wine evening is a well-established part of the social calendar.

Just one further thing to mention. I was discussing the party earlier this evening with a friend, explaining how I'd kept the wine flowing and we'd all had a great time chilling out, chatting, exchanging anecdotes and just generally enjoying the ambience and the company of good friends. She said: "That sounds sooooo John Beresford!" And you know what? She's right. I *do* like to be the enabler of good times for people I love.

Another fine night

We don't need an excuse to spend time with friends, but we had one last night. Ostensibly we went over to Chesterfield to "plan" our activities for New Year - meals, whether we'll be going out or staying in, what we'll be doing if we stay in, etc. In reality, as you might have predicted, this only took about five minutes. Which left the rest of the early evening and night free for general socialising.

Unusually for us, we didn't venture out to the pub before dinner. We'd all brought plenty of liquid refreshment which, combined with the cold weather, was enough to make us hunker down inside for a lazy chat before dinner, during dinner (a fabulous lamb tagine, preceded by some excellent dips and followed up with a delicious berry-fruit pastry), and after dinner.

Somehow I managed to consume the better part of two bottles of wine on my own. Nikki was no help at all, confining herself to a single glass with dinner, but a man's gotta do, etc. This may have contributed to me not remembering an awful lot about Big Band Night on the X Factor, which we settled down to watch off the DTR much later on. A poor show given that I was supposed to be reviewing it. Thank heaven for t'Interweb forums, and YouTube :o)

The only slight downer on the evening was the lack of Ian & Gill, who couldn't make it on account of being temporarily discumbobulated, but we drank a toast to them, and somehow managed to polish off their portions of dinner, so it wasn't a total loss.

Mexican Night revisited

What a fabulous day yesterday! I spent a happy couple of hours being Nikki's kitchen bitch as we prepared the Mexican dishes for tonight's meal: Mexican 7-layer dip for starters, Cheesy chilli beef enchiladas and Mexican pasta bake for mains and pumpkin pie for pud (OK, that might have been where the Mexican theme came crashing down, lol).

With those either wrapped up and shoehorned into the fridge, or baked and cooling on the stove as appropriate, we hopped a bus into town for some gentle browsing and shopping.

The traditional stops - Waterstones; the Apple Shop; Sinclair's Oyster Bar - were supplemented by Habitat (Phil & Vicky were after some posh crockery and we found a replacement pepper mill since ours has gradually been intermittently refusing to emit even the smallest particle of pepper dust for a few weeks); Lloyds for lunch (Sinclair's was full); and Hotel Chocolat (where we bought some chilli chocolate penguins and some exciting-sounding Aztec Chilli drinking chocolate); and HMV (several Pink Floyd CDs to progress my desire to replace my vinyl collection, and a couple of new movies from the 3-for-£20 selection) after which the girls and I caught the bus home leaving the serious shoppers to carry on for a couple more hours.

We ate fairly early and as usual had vastly overcatered, but that was OK as it meant Mexican pasta leftovers for our Sunday meal as well as an emergency food parcel for Nat, and then settled down in front of a flickeringly friendly fire to enjoy an evening of reality with both X Factor and Strictly. Top that off with some rather fine wine and a glass or two of brandy and the whole thing added up to a pretty perfect day.

Lads' night out

Since we moved, "the girls" (i.e. wives and partners of the neighbours) have had three or four girlie nights out. After each one of these is organised, "the lads" mutter about "having to do something" to arrange a lads' night out. "How hard can it be?" we all say. "Just need to set a date," we agree. And then we go home, close our doors, and forget about it until the next girls' night.

So last Friday, at another neighbours' event (the combined "80th" birthday party for the lads at the end), we finally harumphed our way to an agreed place, date and time. Pool night at the local snooker club. We had eight takers, which made a perfect set of doubles over two tables.

That is, until one guy realised he's going away tomorrow and has loads to do before that, so he cried off. And another guy couldn't persuade his missus to forgo her bingo night just once. And a third guy decided he was actually busy until after 9, but he'd come along later. Only of course he never did.

Which left 5 of us. It still worked though, one of us dropping out in turn from a game, therefore playing 4 games out of 5. And the rates are good too - £12.50 to stay on a table all night (which by the time we arrived meant 8-midnight). And the beer is good. And the company was even better. We had a really good time and will definitely be doing again, I'd say.

It was noticeable though, that at the end of the pool we all went home. When the women go out, they tend to congregate back at a house and carry on gassing and drinking until the early hours. We need to pick a non-weekday night next time, methinks.