For the first time since 2005 we actually left our house on New Year's Eve and went round to our friends' Carmen & Paul for the evening. Oliver and Kai had a lovely time playing together but despite being in bed by 7pm they needed approximately 114 visits upstairs from us before they finally settled down around 10pm. Today, Oliver was an absolute mess, he doesn't function very well with sleep deprivation!

Amazingly, and against all expectations, we actually managed to stay awake to see the New Year in!

Taken by Oliver! Also taken by Oliver!

Oliver was very insistent that we leave out a carrot, an apple AND a banana for Rudolph tonight, I'm not sure he is going to be able to take off again after visiting our house. Belly!

Father Christmas is getting a mince pie and, because we carelessly ran out of sherry, some whiskey. Just a small one.

This amount may be added to later.

In other news, Whiskey, I have discovered, is a most effective antidote for a persistent cough.

We went over to my sister's house for a quick Christmas Eve get-together. It was really nice.

Reading Oliver a Christmas Eve bedtime story.

... I have had a roaring temperature, been throwing up, had a X-Ray, a blood test, trapped a nerve in my neck & my son has almost broken my nose.

Tomorrow I'll see if I can break a limb.

Oliver is really, *really* into the whole Father Christmas thing this year. For the last month he has been enlisting Claire and I in games which usually involve him getting into bed with one of us and pretending to go to sleep, while the other creeps into the room pretending to be Father Christmas leaving presents for him. He then "wakes up", runs down to the bottom of the bed to get the presents then runs out of the room and says "Thank you Father Christmas!"

Last weekend the games escalated.

At 7am on Sunday morning, although you can't see it in this photo, we piled just about all his soft toys onto the bed - sorry, Sleigh - in the spare room (and there are a LOT of soft toys), along with various bags and Christmas stockings filled with other toys, books and random bits of duplo, put our Santa hats on, climbed on the bed - sorry, Sleigh - and pretended to fly around the world. Then we had to get down, take a bag of toys into one room in the house, return to the sleigh, take off again, fly around, then land and take the next bag to another room.

We then repeated that for about an hour and a half.

Please note my funky, Christmas Reindeer socks. 

Earlier this week Jonny Wilkinson announced his retirement from International Rugby. I would be the first to admit I am far from the world's foremost expert on rugby, but I enjoy watching the odd game and I always enjoyed watching Wilkinson play.

If other players, from rugby, football and other sports, had shown just half the professionalism and dedication to their craft that he showed throughout his career then our sporting teams could be in a very different place to where they are now.

He is not just a great player but also a top, top man. Recently, a book signing for his new autobiography was scheduled to run from 6.00-8.00pm. Due to the sheer numbers of people queuing and waiting, Jonny stayed there signing until 2am in the morning. How many other people would have done that?

And of course, he will always be imortalised for *that* drop goal that won the 2003 World Cup for England in 2003.

Articles elsewhere:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/dec/12/jonny-wilkinson-retirement-englan...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/dec/13/jonny-wilkinson-england-reti...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/gallery/2011/dec/12/jonny-wilkinson-england-r...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/dec/12/jonny-wilkinson-retirement-plaudi...

 

 

Watching The Muppets Christmas Carol, cooking banana cake, putting up the Christmas tree and grottofying the house.

Not very well organised this year, usually I have all my shopping done well by now but this year no-one seems to have any idea what they want and I seem to really be struggling with finding the time to actually *do* any shopping! Oliver is quite into it this year though, he's very excited about Father Christmas coming, even more so after viewing a video that Father Christmas sent to him - ah the wonders of modern technology! It's nice, I think in previous years he has been a little too young to really understand what was happening, but this time around he seems to get it. Father Christmas was even coming to visit him at his pre-school today which he was really looking forward to.

He had his pre-school Christmas Nativity concert last week which was really brilliant but unfortunately I'm not allowed to post any photos or video up from it on the internet. He had his Shepherds "costume" on, which consisted of an old shirt with my dressing gown belt wrapped around him to keep it on, and an old tea-towel on his head; amazingly he not only put it on but kept it on for *most* of the performance! He essentially spent the entire concert smiling and waving to me in the crowd, it was really lovely.

Unfortunately we have all been rather under the weather lately, everyone has, or has had, rather heavy coughs and colds and I'm pretty sure Oliver has a bit of a temperature today. I've been working from home for the last two days as I just don't feel well enough to go into the office. Hopefully everyone will have recovered by Christmas.

When we went to rock concerts years ago, we would turn up hours early so we could get right to the front of the standing area, have a couple of beers and spend the whole two and a half hour (at least) gig on our feet dancing, singing and jumping around.

On Monday we had a couple of hot chocolates at Harry Ramsdens and spent two and a half hours sitting in some comfy seats behind three members of the blue-rinse brigade, the most energetic thing we did being a bit of clapping and foot tapping.

Times have changed.

Even if the average age of the audience was about 104 - Bournemouth, as much as I love the place, is perhaps not the most energetic of venues for a rock concert - it was again another great Bryan Adams gig. It was a real treat to hear so many of the Waking Up The Neighbours songs played, many of which I'd not seen live since 1994. To hear them played by the full band was superb as having a full band with him is something that Adams has done very rarely in the last 14 years or so.

What do you want to play? I DON'T CARE MAN, JUST PLAY IT LOUD!

Highlights:
Mickey Curry playing the pots and pans.
BA: "Don't you want to go home? I've got 16 albums you know! Lucky for you I don't remember half of them."

A few of my observations from the night, as posted to Facebook:

And a few more photos:

Can it really be 20 years since Bryan Adams' Waking Up The Neighbours was released? God I feel old.

Released in September 1991, Waking Up the Neighbours peaked at number one in the UK with the lead single, "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" spending 16 weeks at number one in the UK Singles Chart (a record that still stands today) and topping the charts in 17 countries in all. It also made record-breaking sales of 4 million copies in the US. It's definitely one of my favourite Adams albums, just about every track brings back some sort of nostalgic memory; most often of listening to it blare out from my crappy tin-pot cassette player on my crappy, tin-pot Suzuki jeep.

A lot can happen in 20 years. I was 19 years old, driving around in my aforementioned battered Suzuki Jeep filling up on petrol that was around 45p/litre. I was working at weekends in Maidenhead at Ernest Jones Jewellers (now gone) and studying during the week in Windsor at East Berkshire College (now demolished.) I still remember walking into town one lunchtime and buying WUTN on cassette tape (format now defunct) from Woolworths (chain bankrupted and closed down.) Memorably, 1991 also saw Tottenham winning the FA Cup after beating Arsenal in the first ever semi-final played at Wembley Stadium (now demolished and rebuilt.)
We spent much of our time going to the bowling alleys at Bracknell and Heathrow and to the cinema at Wycombe, which would frequently be proceeded by a visit to the next door Deep Pan Pizza Company (closed down and rebranded in 1998.) Hmm. Do you see a theme developing here?

In addition to Adam's "Everything I Do", other popular Hit Parade singles that year were The Simpsons with "Do The Bartman", Cher had her first UK Solo #1 with "The Shoop Shoop Song", The Clash hit the top spot for the first time with "Should I Stay Or Should I Go", reissued after being used in a commerical for Levi's, and of course who could forget "The One And Only", from Chesney Hawkes?

The top films of the year included Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, the groundbreaking Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Silence Of The Lambs, Hot Shots and Thelma And Louise.

Bryan Adams has now embarked on a Waking Up The Neighbours 20th Anniversary Tour, so tonight we are heading 2 hours down south to the BIC Centre in Bournemouth to see him. 

On a school night.

I KNOW!