Festive malarkey

So how was your Christmas...? Oh good. How lovely.

My Christmas has been pretty good too, as it happens.

On Christmas Eve, while Blight-of-my-life was out making sure that the horses weren't getting too excitable in the snow, I (finally) put up the Christmas cards.
The "Top Card" award this year was shared by my eldest brother, whose card was a print of one of his own paintings, and my erstwhile work colleague from sunny Devon, who had ensured that his card would be the first we got by sending it in January... and then sent another one that also arrived before all the other cards

Later that evening, my band played at a local pub.
I wasn't too keen on the idea of playing on Christmas Eve, as I thought it might be a bit like being Santa's support act; but it was actually really good fun. Inevitably we were duty bound to include something festive, so "Santa Claus is coming to town" was added to the setlist. We'd also been asked to play Blondie's "One Way or Another" especially for the landlady and it went surprisingly well, considering the minimal rehearsal that we'd given it.

Perhaps the best bit of the gig was an appearance by our special guest vocalist.
Our Lady of The Keyboards had put an armlock on her son Josh and he'd agreed to join us for the last two songs of the first set. As he's a professional performer (World tour with "Mama Mia" and more recently touring in "Dreamboats and Petticoats"), this was a bit of a treat.
It also knocked about ten years off the average age of the band.

Christmas Day itself was very uneventful.
Even though Blight had to see to the horses, I decided that I deserved a lie-in after my night of rock and roll excess and didn't surface until gone ten. At lunchtime, we ambled along to "The Crown" to meet Chemical Al and The One Wise Woman for our customary Christmas drink and then it was a brisk walk home for Christmas Lunch.

This year we had scrambled egg and beans on toast and shortly after that, I went to work.

And if you think that working on Christmas Day isn't much fun, then take a look at this.
This video was shot a few days ago, by Scubamanders, as I decanted the accumulated snow from the bowl. It isn't wildly dramatic, but it isn't something you see every day.



I've been doing this job for nearly ten years, but it was the first time I've done this particular operation.