London Is Going T*ts Up
Judging by the Christmas adverts everywhere, it certainly is.
You see them on bus stops, buses and inside Underground stations.
And Now A Pop-Up Post Office!
Camden Market now has a pop-up Post Office until Christmas. Read about it here in the Standard.
Love Them Or Hate Them!
The Christmas lights are on in Oxford Street.
Love Them Or Hate Them!
As you can see they’re sponsored by Marmite.
Carluccio’s Christmas Menu
When you are a coeliac in a group at an office or other place of work, you are often the only one and when Christmas comes, it is a source of tension and often unhappiness about where you have the Christmas lunch.
Carluccio’s this year have come up with a Christmas menu, that has a choice of turkey, sausage and lentils, cod, steak or two risottos. Only the turkey is not gluten-free. This is the menu for my local restaurant in Islington.
I think they’ve come up with a Christmas menu for everybody.
Christmas, Bloody Christmas
Oh! How I hate Christmas!
I shall have lunch with my son and his friends.
On the other hand, it doesn’t cost me much. I will buy just three presents and a couple of good bottles of wine for Christmas lunch.
I can’t even get to the football on Boxing Day, as there are no trains and I can’t drive.
I think this could be my worst Christmas ever!
Let’s ban it!
After all, the only people who like it are children and I don’t know any of them!
Christmas has never been the same, since you could go down Spurs on Christmas morning to see the match and then come home to a late Christmas lunch!
And now it appears the Underground will be on strike on Boxing Day! They were last year and that was a day to forget. It incidentally looks to be the same argument about triple pay and a day off as well.
The sooner we take the numan element out of the trains the better.
The Best Christmas Card I’ve Received This Year
This was the card I got from Ken Pyne, the cartoonist.
Ken Pyne's 2010 Christmas Card
If you’d like any of Ken’s work or feel you want him to draw something special for you, then use the contact form in this blog.
Gressingham Slow Cooked Duck
My son cooked this for me for Christmas yesterday and it was very nice. It was also gluten-free, in that none of the ingredients could by any means be made with gluten.
the strange thing was that their offices now are in Debach, a small village in East Suffolk, where we all lived for nearly twenty years. I was also nearly killed there, when the chimney went through my office in the Great Storm.
My Fourth Christmas Alone
That sounds bad, but the previous three were very good. In the first I actually helped out with the pensioners’ Christmas Dinner in Bury St. Edmunds and I think, if I’d been here a month or so, I’d have done something similar this year. In the intervening two years, I’ve spent it with either friends or family and today I shall be having lunch with my son and his friends.
One thing C and I always used to dread over Christmas was waking up to some really bad news, like the invasion of Afghanistan by the Russians, Cyclone Tracy, Taeyokale Hotel fire in Seoul or the Indian Ocean tsunami. The last was Boxing Day, but you get my jist.
So today we wake up to the news that a suicide bomber has killed dozens in an aid queue in Pakistan. As he died, the bastard who did it, didn’t even get any satisfaction to know that he done what he intended. But if that is what religion is about, then, I’m on a better track in saying that outside of the humanity and downright goodness shown by most of the world’s great religions, the rest is all about bigotry and hate and is best avoided and certainly to be actively discouraged.
I think in part C and I’s apprehension about Christmas were caused by some of our own little disasters. I think we ran out of gas at least twice, as we forgot to order it and on one Christmas the electric AGA died. That won’t happen this year, as if my son’s cooker fails, he can put everything in a car and get here in ten minutes. He claims to know how my cooker works and I can muddle through, so dinner might be late but it will happen.
We did have a couple of frosty Christmases though concerning C’s mother, who at times could be a bit difficult. I think I appreciate her problems more now, that I’m widowed myself. One Christmas she was staying with us and the film on Christmas Eve was Five Easy Pieces. She didn’t speak to us for forty-eight hours after that! She was also with us when the AGA failed and that had a similar result.
The best Christmas in some ways we had with C’s mother was when she collapsed in our flat in the Barbican with heart trouble. We felt really guilty, as she was taken into Bart’s Hospital, where they did a great job in sorting her out and giving her perhaps another ten years more of life, than she would have got otherwise. She also enjoyed being in Hospital over Christmas, as they looked after her so well and she could tell everybody about all of the myriad medical problems she’d suffered with in her life.
Recession! What Recession?
Or is it just that some people have more money than sense!
But why are people paying £129 for one of Heston Blumental’s christmas puddings, that he created for Waitrose? The story is here in the Daily Mail.
I don’t care and I suspect it’s not gluten free!
Christmas Music
What a pleasure to go to the shops now that the dreadful Christmas music has stopped.
But there is also another side to this. Before Christmas, I visited Waitrose and John Lewis several times. Did they have any Christmas music? I didn’t hear any!
But which store group has done very well over Christmas. Step forward John Lewis!
The Anonymous Widower 