Christmas Day 2005

How can it come on so fast every year? I mean, it seems like only last week that DFS had a sale on - but last night on the telly there was A NEW SALE at DFS, just for Christmas. I noticed that they sacked Katie Mellifluah or whatever 'er name is though. Oh! A new DFS ad means it's Christmas time again, blimey that come round quick too, it seems like only yesterday I was lying in the bath, not laughing AT ALL at the News Quiz chortle-fest summary of the year, yet here I am again, same crap soft left sneery jokes at everything not first printed in the Guardian, oops that's not the Christmas spirit is it, no! This is!

Last year we went a bit mental and decked out our tree with about three hundred of your earth light bulbs. This year we left one packet in its box and placed it in the centre of our Purves&Purves (how much?!) coffee table, delivered just in time for Christmas, thank god, I don't know what I would have done this year without Purves&Purves - no DFS-style sales there, no, neither are there any foot-rests attached to any of their sofas, nor indeed are there any sofas you'd wish to recline on.

[My first glimmer that gay men in London may not quite be all they wish you to believe they are came courtesy of Purves&Purves. I did once drink in that funny pub that was behind Bethnal Green Rd on the council estate, the Duke of York, where there were rarely more than 5 customers so conversation tended to flow freely. I once had a ferocious argument with a skin-head (I know that by definition I myself am a skin head, but I mean that this person had bedecked himself in a very obvious "I am a hard skin head" type style), anyway I was probably drunk so I didn't back down, was quite nervous on the lonely walk home that night in case this hard man set about post-pub discourse - anyway about 3 weeks later I wandered into Purves&Purves just as the aforementioned skinhead, now revealed to be a soft furnishings salesman, bent over backwards (fnarr - insert own dirty joke here) to be pleasant to the Habitat-types that throng Tottenham Ct Rd. My lesson was, look, I don't mind skin heads, nor do I mind furnitures salesmen, it's just that you need to keep an eye on the gap between your self-perception and that which others have of you - such a gap exists with everyone, in most of us it's just wide enough to be amusing - in some it stretches into tragedy. Anyway I digress.]

I think Santa had come because the mince pie was eaten! Keith swears blind it was nothing to do with him

but I'm not TOTALLY convinced. After we opened our presents - I am now officially a PC-gamer widow, as well as the best giggabyted apple (c) endowed consumer in the UK

- we observed the important annual event of taking crusts and nuts to the birds and squirrels in Victoria Park. Was a REALLY beautiful day

(nice arse mate)

and all the geese, swans and squirrels seemed as ever grateful. It always makes me laugh, right, the Regents Canal in our park in E9 - I think it's beautiful - it runs all the way through London to the Regents Park and onwards into W3 (I think? W2? one of the W postcodes anyway) where, I think merely by dint of the fact that it has left the eastend behind, it becomes "little Venice". I mean, it's the same bleedin' canal innit? Why don't they call Maida Vale "Hackney's Estuary"?

The same thing happens with the wildlife. If you go to Green Park and look at the geese and such, and if you are my age-ish, you will hear a Johnny Morris type voice in your head saying "Eugh, h'ai d'you doo?", ever so posh, whereas - and I am in no doubt about this - the squirrels where we live, well, if they were just a little more humble and nervous-critterish, I wouldn't complain to be honest. They come stomping up at ya, all "oi! where's my bleedin' nuts mate - none of them salted malarkey neither, alright?"

After a mild perambulation, which my groaning waist attests is the only exercise that I've had in the last 72 hours, we came back and cooked enough food to feed [insert own mildly nonPC allusion here] well, gosh, more than Keith and I, could manage:

- da guvnor's ate enough now right?

-no more wine for Graeme