Wednesday 19th December

When the BBC first thought of having an annual round-up programme about Sport they could never have imagined the behemoth they have spawned.  SP12 as it has been ‘trendily’ renamed was a massive production which I would imagine gained a huge audience.  As backslappings go it is beginning to rival the Oscars.  And this year has of course been an immense year.  Far too many contenders for the coveted prize, where in past years such diminutive figures as Mark Cavendish and Ryan Giggs (before his dalliances became known) have stepped forward to receive an honour for what exactly?  But this year we had the home Olympics and Paralympics with all the great athletes achieving truly great things.

I along with many others had hoped it might be a Paralympian this year, and at least they were well represented amongst the contenders.  And though if I could have been bothered to have picked up the phone myself I would have voted for Mo Farrah in the end Bradley Wiggins was a worthy winner.  Not only for winning in almost offhand style an Olympic gold, but for the Tour de France victory just before the Olympics.  And it reminded us just how badly named the show and award actually are.  Sports Personality?   Almost none of them have one iota of personality at all.  Andy Murray, the surly Scot can just about mumble at press briefings and whether he has won or lost it is impossible to tell from his glum expression.   Jessica Ennis is sweetness and beauty and strength all in one tiny frame, and at least brought some real glamour to the proceedings.  But the only one who had a real personality, and one suspected even a glimmer of a life outside their sport was Wiggo himself.  And what a picture he looked in his dapper suit and immaculate sideburns and mod haircut.  Wiggo, a worthy winner at last.  And next year the Olympics will have faded and some footballer or maybe a racing driver or a golfer will step forward and mumble out their thanks with no personality at all.

Tuesday 18th December

Keep up at the back.  This was our staff party – yes, all four of us.  After missing out last year we actually managed to synchronise diaries and wonder of wonder, nobody cancelled.  Surprisingly we are all good friends despite having worked together for many years now.  And despite the moans and groans whenever two of us get together about one or the other of us, we really do like each other.  And I say that from the bottom of my glass.  Hahaha.

But actually it was nice to relax out of work, even if the conversation did tend to be about our much loved clients.  The end of this year is also looking a lot more positive than last year did.

So, dinner at The Hawksmoor it was, and very nice too.  Just a pity there are three more days of work to go.

Monday 17th December

Having a Christmas party with 17 grown-ups and 3 toddlers is no easy thing.  It is still a week off and is an afternoon thing so hopefully they will all be gone by six or seven.  Not that we don’t like having people you understand but we have been working on this for the last two weekends, and thank God for a break at work, every evening of next week I expect too.  We normally have two three and one two seater sofas in our front room, and for us two and the dogs to lounge about on that’s just about enough, but for seventeen it really won’t do.  Then there is the food – do we do a cold buffet, finger food, or a sit-down meal?  And where to have the table – upstairs or down?  And if down then we definitely have to move the three armchairs from that room up here.  Now comes the configuration problem, and the three-dimensional game of sliding the pieces to fit begins.  I do not know quite how many different combinations of three sofas and three armchairs you can have in a pretty large drawing room, but I do know that we have tried them all, and one or two I suspect at least twice.

Is it fun. I ask myself?  And yes in a way it is, getting ready for a big family get-together is always fun, if slightly fraught.  And of course one knows that despite the logistical planning, the meticulously laid table, the counting of and arranging of the chairs, the pre-cooking of the gammon, the food almost all prepared – on the day it will all disintegrate into chaos, as babies will need to be fed and changed, and mothers will need the loo, and someone will spill their drink, and someone will ask for pear and apricot juice or some other obscure product, and some will arrive early and some will arrive late.

But I am sure that whatever the disaster on the day it will all be a great success, and just as the last guest has left and we are clearing up we will discover that the red cabbage is still in the microwave, or someone’s presents have been left behind.  Ah, Christmas – what a relaxed time of year. 

Sunday 16th December

Christmas decorations have changed out of all proportion in the fifty odd years I can remember them.  My Nana had these old paper streamers which were basically pairs of cleverly cut and glued different coloured crepe paper that concertined out as you stretched them across the room, they were so old that the colours had faded into different shades of dusty yellow and brown, but as a child I would follow their patterns across the room trying to work out how they had been made.  Every year my mother would get me to help her make streamers by twisting two crepe paper rolls, red and green, gold and white  and yellow and blue and then we pinned them to the corners and they met and were sellotaped around the light cord.  At school we licked and stuck together six inch lengths of coloured and gummed paper to make paper chains we would proudly take home.  My mother, ever the artistic one, would paint a big spindly branch white and hang teardrop baubles and lametta in silver and blue and this would be somehow fixed to a wall.  She also knew a trick of folding a square of silver foil about eight times and making a ‘V’ cut in it to produce a star, sticking two together to make ‘real’ 3d stars hanging all over the room.  The tree was always real, but they were short and fat and spiky then , not the perfect conical trees you get today.  The lights were huge, the size of tennis balls and had big screw-in bulbs and if one went they all did, and you had to unscrew the bulbs one by one to find the faulty one.  My Auntie Ruby and Uncle Albert had real candles on their tree, which they would light and turn the electric off and we would sit and wonder at them for a minute or two, and then they would be blown out until next year.  Our tree decorations were the same every year, little tinsel balls, lametta, a few chocolates in foil and a set of pale pink and fawn plastic reindeer which hung like miniature mobiles on little plastic coat-hangers.  There was always room for a tree ornament I had made in infant school; a matchbox Santa with folded paper arms and legs.  Best of all was the angel, she was very old and tattered, with a real dress of white silk and organza, and a gold wand with the tiniest piece of tinsel wrapped round it.  I cannot remember when we put our decorations up but it was much closer to Christmas day than people do now, and they came down strictly on Twelth Night too.

Years later I found in Liberty some real Chinese paper streamers and lanterns that I used for years until they were held together with more sellotape than paper, then like everyone else I ended up with plastic tinsel and streamers and light-up snowmen and all the crap we have today.  As the years go by though I feel less and less inclined to have any decorations at all; if only they still sold the paper ones like my Nana had.

Saturday 15th December

And now for the totally sublime first real incarnation of Eddi Reader in the excellent but shortlived band ‘Fairground Attraction’.   They literally burst on the scene, admittedly a pretty moribund one, in 1988 with ‘Perfect’ the most perfect single which went straight to number one.  The album ‘The First of a Million Kisses’ was in the charts for nearly a year and was chock-a-block full of great songs like ‘Clare’, ‘Find my Love’ and ‘Allelujah’.  It was so fresh sounding, with a bit of folk, jazz and country in the mix all topped off with that fabulous voice.  They had three more hit singles from that one record, but none got to number one.  They won awards for both the album and the single ‘Perfect’.

The band were recording their second album when they broke up amidst the usual arguments about musical direction, whatever that means, and the album has never been released.  They did release an album of ‘B’ sides called ‘Ay Fond Kiss’ and a few years later a superb live album ‘Kawasaki’ recorded in Japan emerged featuring many of the songs which were lost, and if anything they are even better than their only real album.  A great loss, and the writer of those songs Mark E. Nevin has pretty well disappeared too.  Eddi Reader has had a patchy solo career too, releasing good but fairly safe and boring records to lower and lower sales.  But if you know of any other bands who only really had one hit album which shone so brightly and then the band broke up please let me know.

Friday 14th December

Ah, the Faces were THE band, for a while at least in the early seventies they were where it was at.  I saw them twice in concert, though I was a bit pissed both times, which considering the amount of alcohol the Faces consumed both on and off stage was probably the best way to see them.  Bands were much more fluid in those days, with personnel changing sometimes with each album.  The Small Faces had been very successful in the late 60’s but when Stevie Marriott left to become a superstar (or so he hoped) the band was left without a singer, even though Ronnie Lane wasn’t half bad.  In stepped Rod Stewart, almost unknown at the time and he was joined by Ronnie Wood, also practically unheard of, to beef up the guitar sound.  Well they transformed the band from fey whimsical popsters into a real good-time rock’n’roll band; the best in the land.  On record they never quite nailed it (spending too much time in the pub and not enough in the studio), although singles ‘Stay with Me’ and ‘Ooh La La’ were pretty good, but live they were unrivalled.  Rod, before signing with the band had also signed a solo record deal with a different record company and he fulfilled both obligations, so we had a series of Faces and Rod albums coming out in quick succession, and they were really all Faces albums as the same musicians played on everything from ‘First Steps’ to ‘Smiler’.  Eventually Rod became the biggest superstar in the world and just as the band were floundering Ronnie Lane started playing with the Stones.  Kenny Jones took over drums with the Who when Moonie died, and Ronnie Lane succumbed to MS and died a few years later.  Ian McClagen still makes music and has been trying to organize a Faces re-union for years, but either Rod is running scared or just too big a star to rejoin what he admits in every interview was the best band he ever sung in.

Thursday 13th December

Casualty has been running for years now, and despite Charlie Fairhead I don’t always watch it.  I mean that despite enjoying it when I do catch it, it is never essential viewing a la Holby City.  And of course Holby was a spinoff from Casualty, which I feel in many ways has eclipsed its parent.  The script writing is very clever, and it has that mix of continuing stories running in the background, but a new drama every week, so that if you do miss an episode (friends have a particular habit of invading us on a Tuesday evening) it doesn’t really matter.  But it is the characters that really make it so watchable; Rick Griffin (please don’t let him be written out of it) Malik the black gay doctor with a swagger, Elliott Hope – everyone’s favourite, Nurse Chrissy Williams and her warm but bumbling husband Sacha, the precisely drawn and acted Henrick Hansenn (now sadly departed) and of course uber-bitch Jak Naylor, to name but a few.  And the cast keeps changing, with new entrants like Chantelle, the bimbo with a heart of gold and the new acting CEO of the hospital who is shaping up to be a great character too.

Great great stuff, and because it is only on once  a week it isn’t a soap, and yet it almost has the feel of one, the familiar characters , the ‘adult’ story lines, and not forgetting the gory bits for which the prosthetics team alone should win awards.  And talking about awards why is it that Holby never wins any.  Is it too light hearted to be considered serious drama and too serious for a soap?  Whatever – I love it, and apart from Question Time is about the only programme I try not to miss.  Missing anything else is usually a bonus.

Wednesday 12th December

How did I used to do it?  Work hard all day and then go out in the evening for drinks and a meal and sometimes a party, because I just cannot do it these days.  Either the nature of the work has changed and I am working far harder than I used to, or the same amount of work tires me out quicker, but the last thing I ever feel like is going out in the evenings.  The writing class had a Christmas get together last night.  It had been devilishly hard to get a date we could all agree on, or a time.  The final e-mail said six-o-clock at Pizza Express in Greenwich.  I was running a bit later so scurried off as quick as I could and got there at two minutes past to find….. of course no-one else.  Why, oh why do I constantly fall for it?  I am never late, and everyone else always is – I should have learnt by now.  The next person arrived at 6.20 and we had coffees and a desultory chat both of us constantly watching the door.  Number three came in at 6.45 – this was Irina, the very person who insisted we had to start at 6 as she had to leave by 7.30.

Because she had to leave early and had arrived so late – though she actually lives in Greenwich – she ordered her food straightaway and we other two watched her eat it.  By 7.30 three more had arrived and Irina had left, and we ordered and half way through our not very exciting pizza two other stragglers arrived.  It was a very disjointed but eventually okay evening, but I had been in the place from 6 until gone 10, and was shattered after a long days work anyway.  Ironically most of the people there either do not work in the sense that they have a place to go to, but work from home or can make their own hours.  Consequently I was the only one who would be getting up at 6 the next morning.  And I felt I just couldn’t do this anymore – work all day and then party and work the next day.

Jethro Tull used to sing a great song – ‘Too Old to Rock and Roll, too Young to Die.’  Exactly my sentiments.

Tuesday 11th December

I love garlic in my cooking, especially in my latest specialty ‘Vegetable Jalfrezi’ which is quite hot.  But I have never liked raw garlic, although the eating of such is supposed by many to be effective in fighting colds and generally keeping them in good health.   I also refrain from taking any vitamins or additives or any medication at all – putting off the evil day until I am prescribed for it.  I do notice though that sales of all this stuff is on the increase, especially garlic capsules, which may be an easier way to take a daily dose of the stuff.  So, while not participating myself in the worship of garlic I am quite happy to let others do it if they feel better for it.  Until this morning, that is.

The air on the Underground is never exactly healthy and I sometimes wonder how many germs one is inhaling with every breath.  Once or twice I have inadvertently sat next to a ‘crusty’ person and have had to hold my breath and pretend to be exiting at the very next stop as the smell overwhelms me.  This morning though I was lucky to get a seat straightaway at Canary wharf, so I wasn’t going to surrender it lightly.  The very next stop the person immediately to my left got off and their place was immediately taken.  I was deep into my Trollope and listening to Benny Gallagher on my i-player at the same time and didn’t even notice them.  But slowly it dawned on me that they stunk of garlic.  Prejudice formed in my mind and I assumed it to be an Asian person; although a great fan of their cooking I have noticed that the odour does linger on them sometimes.  Imagine my surprise when it was the mildest looking white middle aged office worker sitting next to me reading his Metro totally oblivious of the reek of garlic emanating from his skin.  I looked around me and noticed one or two other noses twitching as the scent reached their nostrils.  But I was sitting next to him and had the full blast in my face.  I suffered in silence until Green Park, and relieved, made my exit.  I can truly now confirm the efficacy of garlic, it drives away not only colds and germs but ordinary mortals too, its power is truly wondrous to behold a and a delight to avoid.

Monday 10th December

I really don’t know why some stories affect one worse than others.  We can blithely hear of an earthquake in a far-off land and hardly register the number of the dead; we can see those all too familiar pictures of bloated-bellied children, flies crawling round the eyes of African babies and not be affected at all; we can see the lined up shroud-wrapped bodies of yet another civil war atrocity and not really notice if it is Syria or the Congo, and yet, and yet, just sometimes a story almost breaks your heart.

Unlike most of the population who were so excited at Kate being pregnant, I shrugged a sigh of boredom, amazed that such a mundane event should be top of the news.  When will the ‘Royals’ be treated like everyone else was my response, but grudgingly I accepted that for most people it was good news.  Then when the prank phone-call was revealed, at first I thought ‘How puerile’, and then when I heard the soundtrack of the call, at least to the first nurse who put the hoaxers through I couldn’t believe her naivety; they didn’t sound remotely like the Queen or Prince Charles.  Like everyone else I had almost forgotten it by the end of the day.

Then I just couldn’t believe on Friday when that poor nurse was found dead.  I was heartbroken to think that a life had been wasted because of a prank.  And I who love humour almost above everything hadn’t thought it was remotely funny In the first place.  What sort of people think that ringing up a complete stranger at work, when they may be under pressure and doing a really important job, and ‘pretending’ to be the Queen is okay in any way?  Had they learnt nothing from the Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross fiasco?  What gave them the right to broadcast an innocent public servant’s guileless and yes probably naïve response?  And what torment and shame must that hard-working and honest woman have gone through, what inner agony that made her take her own life to escape it all?  A so, so tragic story, and it really affected me, especially in the light of Leveson.  The press and the media just don’t get it, do they?  Nobody, not even so-called ‘Celebrities’ deserve to be served up for public derision.  Report the real news guys, and Comedians – think up your own jokes, don’t try and get your laughs from the gullibility of people who don’t even know they are the butt of your puerile lack of humour.