To everyone who steps the house of Christmas at the vaguest hint of New Year…
The 24 days of rampant consumerism trust leads up to 25 December is called #Advent. The period from Boxing Day to 5/6 January is called #Christmas.
Relax. Live it. Enjoy it.

The Festival of nine Lessons and Carols in a tiny village church on the chortestvday…
#Souldern #midwinter #solstice #advent #christmas???? #ninelessonsandcarols

Day 1 of #advent and finding a little bird hiding in our @angelaharding11 #adventcalendar… #Christmas????

Because its the 1 December and I like carols and flutes… #Christmas???? #carols #advent #abingdonextravaganza @abingdonconcertband

On the first day of advent… Christmas carols with the ????-winning @abingdonconcertband at the #abingdonextravaganza. #Christmas???? #advent

Mary and Joseph look like they have the kind of perplexed and “what are we supposed to do with this now?” faces that I think all new parents probably have… #Christmas???? #advent #nativity

Home to put the shopping away, rearrange the fridges… and a brief break for lunch.

Then I was back to it. Cleaning the kitchen, dusting,scrubbing up cat puke stains and hoovering the house from top to bottom before moving straight on into cooking dinner and making some Hairy Bikers diet pasties. Whilst I caught up with the first five episodes of the excellent Grimm Thoughts series that has been on all this week on Radio 4 with Marina Walker. Thanks go to for pointing me in the direction of it.

The Pylones Boutique is always inviting with its array of bright colours and I found a few stocking fillers in there. The Oxford Covered Market is always a good place to wander round. Turkeys really don’t vote for Christmas…

The Last Bookshop has relocated from Jericho into the centre of Oxford with every book just £2 – perfect for stimulating stockings! And then we were lured by inexpensive, antique glass baubles in our favourite card shop – Arcadia in St Michael’s Street – with a window display to die for.

By then we were beginning to get hungry so we dropped into Wagamama for a meal that may have been a traditional Japanese breakfast but was nonetheless very yummy.

A perfect way to end a perfect Christmassy-festive day. Must make a tradition of this!

So today the plan was to get up not too far off the normal schoolday time, do some productive jobs like cleaning up after 8 cats, feeding the hoards, and generally making the place nice. Then I would settle down to read lots or write lots (to Mr Tumnal), cook lunch for when Emma gets back from work, before heading out to Oxford in the late afternoon before being back in time for the Ocado order. That, as I say, was the plan.

What actually happened was me going back to sleep until half nine and then me being incredibly slow about things until I had barely done the house-being-presentable stuff before Emma got home. Lunch was later than I had envisaged and the weather outside is looking anything but festive.

We’re going to go into Oxford tomorrow afternoon for a bit of a wander.

Far from being a serious affair of tightly kept secrets, from the start we were all keen to piece together who might have whom. Everyone knew who had Kirsty; Amy knew who I had; both Claire and Robert had strayed over the set £3; Emrys had admitted to his containing two presents with 2p change; I had let slip that mine was exactly £3 and not purchased from a chain store; and Nicola’ s had been purchased with Danish Krona.

The steak and ale pie that I had was delicious. It would have been nice to have a washed it down with mulled wine but I was driving. All in all a very nice way to end the working year…

Written as four parts, it does get a bit unrelentingly depressing during the third part which I had to really force myself to read through, and the second half of the book is not as good as the first half but that is possibly because by now we have had all the imagery of Iceland by then. By the end of the book it is a bit of a relief, with it all ending pretty much where it began, but I do feel satisfied for having finished it.

( Independent People by Halldór Laxness )

We have new carol books this year, which some of us have never seen before in our lives. What’s more many of the carols are in 6 flats! Six flats?! It seems the carol books are Salvation Army ones. That explains it then, Salvation Army carols would be written foremostly for brass, and thus the crap key signature for anyone in of a woodwind persuasion.

Following the morning of carols and Christmas markets (including a yummy stone cooked chicken salad on a bed of coleslaw for lunch), we returned home – Emma to a sleep, having only had 1½ hours sleep the night before, whilst I put the Christmas lights up outside and found a home for the large bale of hay we have acquired from Fringford Feeds…

~ Had to squeeze in a visit to see Auntie Helen at the vets in the evening. The graze on Scooter’s eye had got worse and Emma has been on night’s this week so I had to take him. Part way through the consult Emma arrived on her way back from seeing Lily and her sister. Scooter needs to come back in tomorrow for an operation to remove a flap that has developed on the surface of the eye.

~ After a pleasant evening at band playing Christmas music I get home – after a short diversion through Chesterton because of a car accident on the A41 – to find Emma, far from getting ready for work, lying sprawled on the floor in front of the sofa having fainted with exhaustion – the night shift’s having caught up with her. There is no way that she can go to work tonight, having just fainted and so I have to phone up – and wake – the bosses to let them know.

I first came across Angella after she reviewed my own book, and then offered to interview me about it. I’ve just started reading her book, Moments Collide, and already I’m captivated by the quality of the writing and the storytelling…

“There are no beginnings or endings, just a series of moments colliding.”

Felix LaPage was a young man with huge musical aspirations. Growing up, Felix developed a love of music, and with his cello, worked his way through school to try and become a musical success.

However, that’s not the whole story. While working toward his musical dreams, Felix met a woman who would change the course of his life, but not necessarily in a good way. With this woman, Rayne, Felix learns that not everyone is kind or selfless. Struggling through Rayne’s verbal and emotional abuse, Felix also must face getting over her multiple affairs.

It’s one night, on a long train-ride home, where Felix meets a young woman who shows him a different path, a path that could lead to his own personal happiness, free of struggle and pain. It’s up to Felix, however, to choose whether or not he’s meant to walk the painful path with Rayne, or a path that allows him to be free.

I would like to apologise for the unahamedly geeky nature of this post, but its what’s going through my mind at the moment. Normal, festive, joy will resume shortly.

After the floods come the frozen fields down by the river Cherwell and the Oxfordshire canal at Somerton, and scene for a brisk and cold walk in the winter chill. Then we retreated back home to dress the tree. It’s always such a pleasure to get the boxes of decorations down out of the loft and rediscover our favourites, and how and when we came by them.

35 years ago, whilst living in America, I made this one out of an old clothes peg and a doily…

Today, after a last bit of wrapping, and packing, we had a suitably seasonal lunch…

…before going to see Emma’s friend Sue, and to give presents to them and to their daughter Tilly. Emma was briefly reunited with Oscar (neé Diesil) who was a former patient at Bicester Vets before being taken in by Sue’s mum (note the absence of one front leg).

Tilly unwrapping her present and then serving out cakes to all of us

Then we moved on to Emma’s parents where we will be staying for Christmas, and sat and talked, and ate nice food and watched Carol’s from Kings, and looked forward to the day to come…

~ Collected the turkey. John The Butcher was a bit of a bah humbug being rushed over his feet, but jollied up when Emma gave him the bottle of beer we had got him as a Christmas present. Then went on into Bicester to get our weekly veg, and to give Hayley and Spence some chocolate as a present for all the leaves.

~ After lunch we set to an afternoon of baking. Emma made sausage rolls and I made cheese straws for the Bicester Vets secret santa party this evening…

~ Then I decorated the cake, possibly going a little OTT with a snowman as well as Father Christmas, and three outsized robins (or albatrosses) and a couple of silver giant redwoods! Still, if you can’t go OTT on a Christmas cake, when can you?

~ Next, remember that chocolate and brandy mixture from the other day, I finished them off…

~ After the shops we headed back to Helen’s for lunch and a stroll around the block once Lily had had her feed.

~ Tonight, I cooked Nigel Slater’s yummy winter-warmer of a lamb hotpot…

~ Last night I finished reading my own novel. Got a list of edits to be made and then, I think, I’m done – I’m ready. Today I started reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and already I’m hooked. Man tries to kill parents and baby. Baby escapes, ends up in graveyard where ‘residents’ decide to raise him. Such a simple concept. I love it, and I look forward to finding out what happens next.

~ Emma’s best friend Caroline came to visit for lunch and pressies with her children on their way back up to Yorkshire. Arthur, in particular, did a good job of flying the feline flag and entertaining the children.

~ This afternoon I have been mixing up chocolate truffle mixture and baking mince pies whilst catching up on the last four days of The Archers

Clearly, nice though our decorations are, we have some way to go before we can achieve the same elegance…

In the early evening cold and dark of a December night we headed into Oxford to see http://www.creationtheatre.co.uk‘s latest production, a brand new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. We started off with mulled wine and savoury crepes at the Northwall before taking our seats in the theatre that was a former-Victorian swimming pool.

I had been worried about this production for two reasons: firstly, that last time Creation Theatre performed here, although Measure for Measure was brilliant I had been disappointed by the magic of the venue (for a site-specific theatre company like Creation, the venue is important); and secondly, the last time I had seen them do this story it was not their best production.

I shouldn’t have worried, tonight’s production was brilliant on an epic scale, full of carol singers, with words that weaved themselves into the story, a simple yet effective set and a brilliant cast, it was simply amazing! We’ve had so many perfect starts to Christmas, but surely Christmas has truly begun now…

~ we made the most of the weather today, heading out into the cold, clear midwinter’s day to clean out the bunnies and the chickens, who were very soggy.

~ after the late breakfast we decided to forgo lunch and have a late Sunday roast beef dinner in the mid-afternoon. So I did a bit of preliminary preparations for the meal, before setting to rearranging the study. The study has got a bit out of control of late – no longer the comfortably full room of books to study and work in – but the dumping ground for everything we haven’t sorted out. I still need to tackle long overdue filing and purge some of the unnecessary junk, but it is now reorganised into such a way that both Emma and I could sit at our respective desks at the same time, and the newly-acquired, free, desktop computer can be set up and used.

~ dinner was, although later than planned, yummy. Beautiful meat and veggies with gravy of just one oxo cube and the meat juices. The only slight disappointment was the roast potatoes, which, having been in the oven a bit too long were a little on the charcoal/carcinogenic side of done.

Quite why the players of flutes choose to play what is essentially a tube of cold metal which they press to their lips in the freezing cold is beyond me (hey, I’m one of them!), for it was flippin’ freezing today, if beautifully clear and bright – that kind of perfect midwinter’s day. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, even if has taken a while to thaw out and get warm again!

( more pictures )

Today was the first time that the new Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences marketing team was complete and all in the same room at the same time. So we all went to lunch to the Brookes Restaurant…

Winter squash soup
pomegranate salad with spiced molasses dressing and caramelised onion bread

Roast breast of Wiltshire turkey
pressed leg, stuffing, sausage and bacon with a port and redcurrant gravy

Chocolate Christmas pudding
brandied plums and vanilla seed ice cream

Managed even to get a new website live before lunch, and do some more work after!

( photographic evidence )

I’ve also made the birthday cake for Emma, and done a spot of wrapping, and finished my Christmas cards. I think things are starting to come together at last…

Certainly, our little band managed to get, possibly our first, standing ovation.

~ Going to band rehearsal was the perfect antidote to a bit of a stressful day being lied to and confused by the incompetence of Comet’s customer support. I mean what was the point of telling me to take photographs of the fault when it represented itself if you can’t actually use that photograph in your diagnostics?! Barmey, stupid incompetence on the part of Comet.

~ I feel separated from my novel. Such a lot to do at the moment I’ve been neglecting my baby and I don’t like it. I need to get back to Mr Tumnal’s story, and the resolution in the final quarter of it. Must. Get. Back. To. It…

~ hand a moment of curiosity this evening. Received a very nice Christmas card from Rachel, but I wasn’t immediately sure who ‘Rachel’ was. I know a few Rachel’s. It wasn’t until later in the evening that I realised that it was the very nice, and now Oxford-based, rachel2205. For the record it was the distinctive purple envelope that gave it away! I remembered seeing a photo of them all neatly stacked and ready to be posted on facebook…

~ have made a start on writing my Christmas cards. Probably a bit late really, but actually ahead of where I am normally at this time of year. Christmas does seem to be galloping up on us fast this year, and I’m still four presents down on my Christmas shopping…

We never had a video camera as a family, but just occasionally there exists a bit of footage. For the most part its the kind of thing that is impossible to watch at the time of recording but years later, when you’ve forgotten it exists its nice to discover them again, particularly when you get to see your grandparent’s again, and sufficient time has passed that the feelings of horror of how thin one was then, or the amount of hair one had, are not quite so horrific.

It’s fun to see things again the traditions that have built up and lasted over the years, and which one’s you have taken with you into your new life with your partner, and which one’s you have lost, or which one’s you didn’t have to lose because they are (coincidentally) the same. One of the big one’s from my family is that the Christmas cake is cut on Christmas Eve with an ‘extra’ present ‘from the tree’ to start the festive season off.

What Christmas traditions do you have?

(includes the classic response from my Mum, when I tell her and my Dad that they said there was no way I would get that for Christmas, “When I have ever told the truth about Christmas?”)

Very excitingly we saw: Lapwing, Little Grebe, 11x Herons, Jack Snipe, Common Snipe, Shelduck, Shoveler, Teal, Pochard, Wigeon, Pintail, Gadwall, Tufted Duck, Mallard and Bittern (our second of the year!).

Additionally, I now have the gossiping call of the Eider duck as my message alert ringtone on my mobile phone!

I even got myself organised enough to write the first four of my Christmas cards and thus avoid the posting charge to Iceland!

~ the main reason for working from home was so that I could head out for a lunchtime date with the dentist to have my mouth frozen up for the afternoon and a filling repaired. I took the opportunity to turn up a day early for our veg from Hayley in Bicester Sheep Street and some meat from the butcher in Launton. John The Butcher can sometimes be a bit of a grump but he was on good form this morning. Not sure how we got on to talking about it but apparently for 20 years he lived over the shop in the butchers until he bought a small place in Bicester. He wasn’t sure about it at first but has looked back because he no longer gets people turn up 3 hours after they’ve closed saying, ‘I know you’re shut but you don’t have…’ or once, worse, someone knocking on the door on Christmas Day complaining that their turkey had no giblets and that their Christmas was ruined?!? What the?!!

~ discovered the difference between white and bronze turkeys. Both are free-ranged, and ethically reared, but the White turkeys have the freedom to go in and out of the barn but tend to spend most of their time in the barn, whilst the bronze turkeys get turfed out of the barn in the morning and not allowed back in until evening. Also, apparently the man at Peachcroft is upping his prices a bit too much, and so John has found someone from the same farming association.

~ I also had to stay in this morning for the TV repair man to come out and have a look at the mysterious 1 pixel wide red line running vertically down the screen for a few minutes after first switch on. The engineer came bright and early as we were the first on his call list but sadly the TV was not as cooperative and refused to show said line for the nice man. He’s going to try and get us a new screen anyway though, and in the meantime we have his email address in case it comes back and we can take a picture of it.

~ following my day’s work, spent mostly working on the staff profiles section and the ‘International students’ section of the new School of Education website that I’m working on, I relaxed into Christmas cheer and stirred-up this year’s Christmas cake. Reading back on last year’s entries I see that I made it this weekend last year too.

~ have erected the Christmas tree (awaiting decorating as Emma was out seeing her mum and sister) and made a start on my Christmas cards this evening. As regards cards, I’ve been debating whether or not to do a Christmas letter this year. I have done one ever since 1994, and I think (hope) that it is not one of those awfully showy off, stereotypical one’s, but is instead wryly amusing and suitably self-deprecating. However, do I really need to in these days of facebook and twitter and online journalling. More than ever, our friends know more than they ever have about the minutiae of our daily lives. That said, as I worked out this year’s Christmas card list (rising to 49) there are some who either don’t do facebook, or I know do genuinely do like receiving it, so I think I may do one but with a lower than usual print run.

I guess primary, if it wasn’t for the internet then I wouldn’t have the job that I love. Not that I ever trained for this job, or imagined that I would be here, now, doing things on the web that people who don’t work on the web imagine to be some new form of magic. It’s not, but its a nice to imagine that it might be. I fell into website via publishing, being the person for taking other people’s highly crafted and edited scientific journals and making them appear in an online form. Now I build websites, both inside and outside of my formal ’employed’ hours, and I’m getting my hands dirty with the dark arts of social networking. Some people run scared from any kind of social networking, put off by the scare stories and privacy concerns that you get reported in the media, but I embrace them now. I wouldn’t have my job if it were not for social networking and beyond that I wouldn’t have my life.

Ten years ago I was bullied at work (something that I have spoken about before in these pages), and it was during the process of dealing with this, doing something about it, and eventually realising that the person responsible was nothing more than a pathetic, little, shit, …that I came to learn that I might, possibly be affected with aspergers. The discovery, higlighted by my brilliant cousin, made sense – it made a lot of sense, but it was not for another 3 years, and the assistance of possibly the best manager ever, that I got to see and receive coaching from Bill.

After my initial investigation into aspergers back in 2002, I decided that I needed to try/start to be more confident in myself and put myself out there a bit more. Baby steps and all. I became a company first aider, and joined the social committee. I also started an online journal. At the beginning of it, I didn’t know what to write. I guess there was part of me that wanted to be read – hey, I’m a writer and hope one day to be published! – but at the same I really didn’t want to feel like I was writing for anyone, and to be read. I quickly discovered two important rules:

• if you write something thinking its going to be interesting, then its not…
• …but if you write what you find interesting then people do enjoy reading/commenting on it

Why social networking has become important to me

LiveJournal was my first foray into social networking, and of its kind was probably my first love. Principally I have felt secure in the way that you can limit the readership of posts to private (not yet done), friends only, any multitude of smaller friends groups, or public. This freedom has enabled me to write more openly about things, and to open up in public posts too in ways that I would not have expected I could have.

LiveJournal, and the support I got from my friends there, gave me the confidence to go on online dating sites, and I developed the profile there within tightly locked friends filters. Thus, without LiveJournal, I would not have met Emma and may well still be single to this day.

The likes of facebook and twitter (what you might more readily call social networking) are purely an extension of the LiveJournal experience. I have got back in contact with people whom I should not have lost contact with but did because at the time I did not have the social skills to keep in contact. It has blended the online LiveJournal friends world with the face-to-face friends world. When it comes to twitter, it a) serves as a lazy way to easily post to facebook and also to these journal pages, and b) to network and get jobs. I am better at sticking my hand up and voicing my opinions, but I am still not good in that crowded room. I have made contacts via twitter that I would not have made face-to-face and furthered my freelance web design business as a result.

Some people consider social networking as antisocial, but for someone like me who can still struggle with those face-to-face social cues, social networking – far from being anti-social – has actually made me more social; more Me.

…just in time for Christmas cake, a Christmas tree present too, and to help my nephews put out reindeer food and to leave something for Santa by the fire…

Addendum: Ronnie feigned illness in advance of our departure by not eating anything for all of yesterday and this morning, so we decided to take him with us. Immediately upon installing ourselves in our room in Postbox Cottage he purred like he had never purred before and wolfed down a bowlful of food. Have we been taken for a ride…?

This afternoon I mainly read lots, whilst curled on the sofa, before putting together a yummy lamb hotpot for dinner.

I’ve base iced the Christmas cake, ready for final decorations tomorrow, and boxed up the chocolate balls, cooked a nice dinner, thought a bit about Louis Tumnal’s story, wrapped some more presents, and made the first mincepies of the season … and eaten them…

~ The boiler repair was actually reasonably straight forward. It’s a condensing boiler, we’ve now discovered, and the problem was not actually with the boiler, but that the outlet for the condensation went into our drainpipe from the roof, and this was frozen, top to bottom. So the condensate had no where to go and had frozen itself and backed up into the boiler where it dripped out and stopped it working.

~ This evening we had our Sunday roast: a pheasant from the local butchers at a very bargain price – well, pheasant’s are – which was very nice and tasty. Now we are just relaxing in a nice warm, snuggly house…

It’s a shame, I always look forward to the Christmas carols and with snow on the ground it would have been so nice, but at the same time I was fearing getting back if not getting there. Six hours later and I’m very glad we didn’t go. There’s 8½ inches of snow out there now and it didn’t stop coming down till gone 7pm!

I’ve finished making the brandy chocolate truffles though, and been for a walk with Emma in the fire, and hibernated in front of the (fake) fire. A perfect advent day…

~ put the Christmas tree up, and make the house nice. Although just what Blini will make of a Christmas tree I’m not sure… *shudders* She’ll probably try and climb it. :-

~ to make the Christmas cake. This should really have been done last weekend, but we were away, so…

~ to make the marmalade I’ve been meaning to make for, umm, way to long.

~ not a plan, but I note that our honeymoon album has been dispatched with the estimated delivery date of 8 December. Looks like its been dispatched with FedEx though, so I’m hoping it might arrive sooner.

~ I’ve been listening to a new artist recently; Rosie Caldecott. We heard her sing at Lucy’s charity event for the floods in Pakistan last month, and have since been in contact with her via myspace, facebook and email. She’s not got anything released yet but she’s been feeding me tracks to listen to. They good. Folksy and mellow. As a place to stash them I’ve added them to my Mr Tumnal playlist and they seem to strike at the place within me to inspire creativity. Her mood and her style of singing seems to fit so well with Louis’ gentle tale, and his growing and complicated relationship with Kathryn, and indeed, with Amanda.

~ Have finally seen the new Harry Potter film, and it was better – much better – than I was expecting. The adaptations of Order of the Phoenix and Half Blood Prince had fallen down for me because they didn’t stand alone as films in their own right but required substantial amounts of prior knowledge of the books. This one, whilst obviously only been attractive to people who had been on the Harry Potter journey was much more self-contained and stand-alone – an advantage I guess of being given the time of two films. It was always going to be an awkward film with this splitting, and the resulting abrupt ending but they did well to work in a narrative structure of beginning, middle, and end with Voldemort’s quest for the elder wand providing a natural end point.

Of course, part of today has been spent watching and waiting for snow…

…which did, in the end come to us; laying an even, if thin, covering of seasonal joy to the roads that was very much appropriate to going round to Lucy’s in the evening to enjoy mince pies, mulled wine and a good Christmas sing song around the piano. 🙂

After the Ashmolean we made our way to the Oxford Castle and took a tour around the Christmas German market, which was fun and festive, if, for the the most part full of expensive gifts you probably don’t need or really want. But I did buy myself a bag of roasted chestnuts which I proceeded in munching my way through.

Wandering back through town, we showed Sue the covered market with its real butchers and the racks of deer and game hanging outsde dripping blood in a very organic way; and on to Blackwell’s where I worked out what present to buy Nick, if not there.

Heading for home we parked in Bicester Market End, and had a little wander in Lisseter’s antique shop before having a hot chocolate at the Swan and then, by 5.30, arriving at St Edberg’s for the Bicester Concert Band Christmas concert and carol service. At the end of the day we were very much in the Christmassy, festive spirit!

The weather was beautiful, clear skies and bright, winter sun. I really missed missing the carols at Millet’s Farm this year.

Then I headed off on my secret mission to purchase a birthday present by proxy for Emma – so I shall say no more in case she reads this and guesses. In the Christmas spirit, I got home and hung my wreath on the door and put the outside lights on the tree outside. This evening we put the Christmas tree up…

…tomorrow I intend to make mince pies!

2. We get the turkey in, and hatch plans to make devils on horseback, and head out on a walk from Ogdens, and round Hasley Wood. It’s airy and blows the cobwebs away. We come back to soup for lunch.

3. I sort through my photos from the last two days and post belated entries to these pages.

4. I curl up in the (very agreeable) lounge and read my book. I am close to finishing it, which is good, as tomorrow will doubtless bring a stack more, and I like to start a new book on Christmas day.

5. Have just watched Carols from Kings and, if there was any doubt, Christmas has definitely begun. Slightly jarring though was the mention of a poem by Alan Titchmarsh in the readings. It was good, and I enjoyed it, I just felt it a little odd to suddenly hear his name thrown into a carol service. It’s probably just because I wasn’t aware that he had written religious poetry.