Sunday 20th December 2015

As a start, I should warn you there might be a bit about football in this post. Just sayin'....

Saturday

As we woke just before dawn, rain was falling, gently. But it was the weekend. Jools' employers had given all their employees a one hundred quid Sainsbury's gift voucher. So the decision of which shop we would visit was made for us, so after coffee off to go, onto the Deal road and to the supermarket. Saturday was unofficially christened Mad Saturday, being the final shopping Saturday before Crimbo, and with that in mind we want to get the painful bits over with as soon as possible. Once there we grab a trolley and rush round filling it up; mainly beer and cheese and crackers. We are now ready for Crimbo, just the meat and veg to get, so we can go home for breakfast.

In a call to Mother dearest this week, I asked her if there was anything she wanted. And in a day or so she answered that she really would like a handbag. A black handbag. Not too big. And with a shoulder strap. So, with it being close to the big day, it meant heading down into town to venture into M&S.

We park in the place near to the Co-Op, which means we can get it cleaned. We spit up, JOols to run errands and me to photograph Burlington House and other stuff. I am done in about ten minutes, so I go into M&S, and am shocked at the price of some of these bags. In the end we get an identical one to the one Jools got a couple of weeks back and we get change out of thirty quid.

I see that the church is open, so I decde to go in to revisit some of my shots from when I was last inside, about three years back. It is an ancient church, but heavily Victorianised, you have to look hard to see the really old bits, but it has some nice glass and plenty of memorials, which I snap some of. I was done in about ten minutes: we walk to the car, pay the car-washer guy and drive home, along Townwall Street and up Jubilee Way, where the traffic heading into port was building up again. But we are fine, up the hill, round the roundabout and along the Deal road, turn off to the village. And we're done. For today.

Back home in time for ten, and so we can listen to all of the Huey show on Radio 6, and whilst we're listening we can bottle the sloe gin, which has been fermenting in demijohns for a good two months or so. We have five bottle of the stuff, even after giving away two small bottle already. We had also hoped to finally get round to bottle the elderberry wine which has been bubbling away since the beginning of October. But when we came to get together all the stuff needed, we found we were lacking one important thing, or 12 really: wine bottles. So, after searching everywhere, we have none. Well, maybe three, five if you count a couple of large beer bottles. So, Jools will have to go round her Dad's to check on his stocks.

So, at three, the important business of the day begins, with kick offs all around the country. Norwich made the long trip up to the Theatre of Dreams, or Theatre of Revised Expectations as it has been renamed since Sir Alex left. Anyway, not been our happiest of hunting grounds in recent times, we lost 4-0 in each of the last three visits. But we took the lead in the first half, and increased it to 2-0 after ten minutes of the second half. We were in dreamland. Man Utd pull one back, but City always looked dangerous on the break, but hold on for a 2-1 win, and our first win there since 1989, when I was still working at the chicken factory and my life in RAF was ahead of me. In fact my friend Owen's brother bought the video of that 2-0. Then a rare thing, a video of a game. He insisted I borrow it, and it was the whole game, shot from a single camera, without commentary or replays, and far away from the crowd, I seem to remember it almost be silent. But we did win, and we won again yesterday.

What a fne modd that put me in for the evening, an evening spent watching two more discs of the Hobbit trilogy. I have to say it holds together well, and the decision to make it in three parts seem to work as the story just about allows for it. But the real star again is the New Zealand landscapes which decorate the backdrops of almost every scene. One day we will go to visit and see these sights ourselves.

We feast on party food as we watch the films, and sip strong Danish Christmas ale. A fine evening then.