Archives: Shopping

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed will know that this week I made the fatal shopping error of trying on the coat before you check the price tag. I therefore ended up in a large debate with myself about whether I could really stretch beyond my original price. Luckily for the shop in question’s sales, they had a 15% student discount that handily made my decision for me. So I now own this coat:

Looks even better on

But the main point of this blog isn’t to show up my frivolous tendencies, but rather to draw a distinction between musicians and buskers, if there is one.

Coming out of the 4th store of my magical mystery tour of the men’s outfitters of Liverpool town centre, I came across an interesting fellow at the side of the street. At first glance he was your ordinary busker, standing in front of a recession-closed store, guitar slung over his shoulder with the case open in front of him in the usual “not begging: entertaining” kind of way.

I should say at this point that I love the buskers in Liverpool. They’re all brilliant and they really liven up the town and help to give it its vibrant feel as you stroll down Bold Street to an assortment of musical melodies that never seem to intrude on each other.

This guy, though, was something else. As I looked again at him as he chatted to a friend before starting up his set, I noticed he had his acoustic guitar plugged into an amp. I don’t know what you call those kinds of guitars – not really acoustic, since their amplified, but not really electric because they still sound like they did before – but he had one of them. Seeing a guitarist with an amp isn’t unusual, either, in fact it’s more frequent that I’d have thought before I came up here.

Then I noticed that in front of him stood a microphone stand with, appropriately, a microphone in it. As I walked past and got a better angle on his set-up I realised he not only had all of the above, but also a large car-type battery plugged up to the amp and a mini-mixer for his two inputs. He even had a wheeled-trolley to carry it all on.

Now, I don’t want to put the guy down at all, but with the best will in the world, that’s not busking, is it? That’s gigging without a fee.

Busking is all well and good but when you stop just short of bringing your own staging on to the street to perform then, for me, that’s kind of going against the grain. Don’t you think?

I’ve managed to grab half an hour before my day starts today to rap out a bit of a blog about getting here and what it’s all like.

The first think I have to say is that I’m sitting at a computer in LIPA’s Learning Resource Centre (essentially the library and computer room) and there’s a big plaque on the wall listing the sponsors of the room. Amoung a few well-known corporate clients, it also lists Jane Fonda, Billy Joel, David Hockney and Elton John. Reading those names on the wall of the place I’m going to be studying theatre for the next 3 years gave me such a boost this morning – this place matters.

The first few days have been crazy. I left home – as you may have seen on my Twitter feed – at almost 6am on Monday morning to get up here for my enrollment at 10. We managed to do the trip in almost precisely 3 hours, which was pretty awesome at that time in the morning, and got my keys for the flat straight away, which gave us time to unload all the stuff from the car (all 7 boxes, 1 suitcase and 1 holdall) before I had to be at uni.

I got enrolled and then filtered into the Paul McCartney Auditorium (how cool!) for intorductory talks about the place and what’s expected of all the freshers. In the afternoon, after grabbing a quick bite of lunch and then waving Dad off, I met with my course group, the TPDT guys (Theatre Performance Design and Theatre Performance Technology – essentially the same course but with slightly different focus between designing and practical tech-ing). The tutors intorduced themselves and outlined the course, then we had a couple of hours to kill before a group social in the evening, which turned out to be great fun.

Tuesday was in at 10am again for more talks and safety briefings, then a fairly free afternoon which I spent shopping for bits and pieces I’d not managed to get before hand or had left at home. In the evening I popped over to a friend’s house and we chilled and drank vodka and cokes (made with the roughest vodka in the world – the joyous life of studenthood) before her flatmate and I hit the town for a couple of hours to make the most of £1.50 Jaegerbombs (Jaegermeister and Red Bull for the uninitiated) before calling it a night around 1am.

Wednesday was, blessedly, a day off, although I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep so I ended up walking down to the Albert Dock at 7am, which was actually beautiful. Got back to the flat around 8.30 and proceeded to sleep til 2pm. Nice.

I pootled in town in the afternoon and grabbed an iPod dock – my room currently has no TV, no internet, no computer or anything, so I needed something to break the silence of the room that didn’t involve me walking around with my headphones in 24/7.

Last night was Blind Date in the LIPA Bar, which was sadly compered and played out by third years who spent the whole evening drunkenly making in-jokes about their mates, leaving most of the freshers feel pretty confused and stupid – not the best was for the Student Board to welcome the newbies in the middle of freshers week, it has to be said.

And now, once I finish this I’m off to grab a chocolate bar from Julie and Julie in the canteen downstairs (they’re great – the ladies, not the chocolate bars) to give me enough energy for the next 4 hours of the TPDT Treasure Hunt! How cool!

Once I’ve sorted myself with a laptop and internet connection at the flat, these blogs will hopefully get a little a) shorter and b) more regular, but until then you’ll have to make do with the Twitter feed on the left of the page and random updates on here as and when I get chance to jump on a comp here.

This is going to be a short summary of how we got to where we are, but suffice it to say that the end result is WE’RE GOING TO HAWAII TOMORROW!!!

It’s been a crazy last 8 days, starting with feeling slightly odd leading right up to Saturday’s blog detailing my admission. My lovely new iPhone then decided to stop working as an internet-receptacle so I couldn’t update the blog any further.

The docs essentially said on Saturday that they a) had no idea what was wrong with me but b) that it looked pretty bad. Although the X-ray techs refused to CT me, the docs between them had come upon the summation that it was some kind of chest infection which meant that whatever happened, Hawaii was off.

When they came around Sunday they told me I was well enough to go home – they still didn’t know what it was but the 24 hours of oral antibiotics they’d had me on were seeing my infection markers dropping and things looked OK. I thanked them and they left.

Them then team leader reg for the weekend came back in and asked about Hawaii. Essentially, he said, they needed to ask themselves 3 questions as my doctors:

1) Was I well enough to go?
2) Was I a danger to other passengers on a plane (ie, through Swine ‘Flu etc)
3) Was I fully insured in case anything worsened or happened beyond what they’d observed.

The answers, as he gave them, were:

1) Yes, as far as they were concerned.
2) No, as they didn’t believe I’d had Swine ‘Flu in the first place
3) They would need me to see.

Cue a frantic rush around last night to try to find out what our insurance policy covered. What we came up with was that because the admission happened before I flew, the chest infection then counts as a pre-existing medical condition which they must be made aware of or no treatment related to it in any way will be covered while we’re away. Being a Bank Holiday weekend, this meant that we were now unable to inform them of the change until we flew, which essentially voided the policy.

Cue frantic scramble to find a company that would cover me for CF, lung transplant and a resolving chest infection – all three of which would need to be covered if I needed any treatment for an exacerbation of my current condition. After a pleasantly home-bound night’s sleep we spoke to a company this morning and – in brief – we shelled out a very large amount of money to ensure we didn’t have to claim back a slightly very larger amount of money for canceling the holiday and we were set to go.

Cue frantic running around the Bank Holiday shops today to fill my uni shopping list, my holiday shopping list and still get back in time to pack it all into boxes, bags and suitcases in time to head over to the ‘rents this evening for dinner and sleeps so they can run us to the airport at silly o’clock tomorrow morning.

It’s been a total whirlwind and both K and I are pretty overwhelmed by it all, but the bottom line is that we’re on our way to Hawaii. And when I get back I’ll have less than 12 hours in Liverpool before the start of my first ever term of uni. At the end of it all, things couldn’t really be more exciting. I just wish I’d done it all in a slightly more boring and less melodramatic way.

Up at 8.15am this morning to head into London with K to drop off her assignments. We decided to make a day of it and thought we’d meet my bro in Town for lunch while we were there.

A 9.46am train from Bletchley – after a minor myriad of parking drama in their new “multi-storey” car park at the station – got us in to Euston just after half ten and into City Uni in Islington around 11am. We did he necessary drop-offs and collection of completed and marked coursework and then repaired to the cafe downstairs to dissect the results, which weren’t what K had hoped for. That said, we subsequently met three of her coursemates who all said that they scored lower than they had hoped and/or expected to and that the piece was particularly difficult.

Didn’t help confidence massively when you see notes in the margin from the tutor marking the piece referring to “applicibility” of something – if the tutor can make up words when summarising an essay, what chance do the students have, really? But that’s just me.

After a cuppa and a quick get-to-know-you chit-chat with some of K’s classmates, she whisked me off on a quick tour of the pertinent parts of the Uni campus, including the way-cool multi-media “pods” that the lecturers use when teaching which have all kinds of awesome high-tech gadgetry in them.

After the tour we headed up to the British Library, grabbing and highly-heathy MacDonald’s lunch on the way, only to discover that the exhibition on Henry VIII we wanted to see isn’t actually open for another 10 days. That’ll teach us to read more carefully.

We wandered back up to Euston with the intention of heading in to Leiscester Square or possibly Oxford Street but a combination of recent lack-of-sleep, extensive walking and half-term foot traffic meant we opted instead just to hop a train home.

Getting back in just after 3pm, I hit the computer for some email clearage before we headed into MK to stop in at Borders. I picked up a couple of bargain DVDs (Children of Men (awesome) and The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (not seen yet)) and K grabbed some reading material. Then we headed over to Waterstones in the Centre:MK to pick up a copy of The Writer’s Tale, a book following Russel T Davies’ creation of his fourth and final season of Dr Who before handing the reins over to Steven Moffat. I’ve so far only read a few pages and I’m already addicted – it’s very open, honest and works to open up the gates on a view of how he writes, something which is hard to find experienced writers talking about. While copying another writing will never work save to make you think very much of their ideas not yours, it’s always interesting to see how someone else approaches things and to realise that you might not be totally barmy after all.

After the book tour and an unsuccessful scout of travel agencies, we hit the cinema for The Boat That Rocks, the best worst film ever of this post’s title.

It’s an extremely bizarre film. It’s hackneyed yet fresh, it’s funny yet corny, it’s laddy yet tender, it’s meaningful yet frivilous. Most of all it’s frustratingly inconsistant – a major plot point (which I won’t divulge save to say it’s the final-reel action beat) moves at various paces from immediate and imminent danger to pausing catastrophe for a tea-break and chat. It leave many, many dramatic beats either unexplored or not followed up, almost like Richard Curtis (he of Four Weddings…, Notting Hill and Love, Actually fame) shot so much stuff he couldn’t choose what to leave in or take out so he closed his eyes and randomly selected scenes to excise.

But despite all of this – things that for almost any other movie I would tear my hair out, shout at the screen and spend 600 words here railing against – I really enjoyed it. It’s funny. It’s emotional, although not as tear-jerking or heavily-sentimental as Love, Actually (the only other of his scripts Curtis has directed himself). And somehow it just works. Just don’t ask me how or why.

Hugest apologies for the lack of blogging – last week was completely manic, trying to squeeze in as much of my over-flowing inbox of work as I could before spending the weekend away in Bath with K’s ‘rents for their joint birthdays.

It was a totally fantastic time, but I was unable to fore-warn of a lack of blogging as it would have given the game away. The weekend, which was spent in a rented cottage just outside Bath in a lovely little village near Westbury along with three very good friends of the family, was a total surprise.

We took K’s ‘rents off to Longleat house for a tour, which her Mum believed was all that was happening, before she received instructions to pack for 3 days away. Arranging to travel in separate cars, we arrived with her best friend from the village back home in ours to surprise her. With the other friends traveling up from Devon stuck in roadworks, we frantically tried to delay the house tour for half-an-hour. Expecting to be told that it couldn’t be done, instead we were offered a private tour of the house for no extra charge – remarkable people at Longleat.

Despite the delay, we were still un-accompanied at 12.30 when our private showing of the great house began. It was a fascinating and mesmerising tour and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in history or historical houses – it’s gobsmacking. Half-way round, the staff were so unbelievably kind enough to bring the missing pair of our party up to join us when they arrived. Much surprise (although Mama D had guessed who the sixth and seventh of the party might turn out to be) and hugs/handshakes ensued before the very accommodating host could continue her tour.

Once we were done we all repaired to a local pub for a late lunch, after which we all waved goodbye to the each other before heading, in convoy, to Woodside Cottage to surprise them once again with their accommodation and the fact that all of us were, in fact, staying with them.

The evening was spent in a bit of a haze of trying to work out who was where (K and I being in the annex across the way), whether anyone wanted to eat anything (verdict: no, but cake will do nicely) and what we were up to the next day (eventual decision, whatever we wanted) before we all engaged in a frankly hilarious round of card games before taking ourselves to an early bed.

The next morning, to my surprise, I was awake before the house opposite, heading out on a paper run before breakfast. After a chilled out morning, K and I headed into Bath itself to catch up with a an old friend over lunch and a personalised tour of Bath, which included some very strange people reading poetry in a taxi and more gorgeous architecture than you could shake a stick at.

In the evening, after a brief afternoon nap, we all enjoyed dinner together before a dynamite game of Scattagories before crashing out.

Weirdly, I woke up on Sunday morning feeling absolutely awful. I’m not sure if I was over-heating and dehydrated or had eaten something disagreeable the previous day, but my head was pounding and I felt incredibly sick.

As the others all headed off to Lacock Village and Manor, I stayed in bed with K watching over me and ended up sleeping until gone 3pm, at which point I woke up feeling almost right-as-rain, save for a lack of energy from lack of food.

Another evening of fun-and-frolics was met with an early(ish) morning this morning, getting up to breakfast, pack and leave by 10 am. As the others began their trek home, K and I decided to take a more leisurely turn back to MK, stopping to catch up on Lacock (where I discovered they’d used the Abbey to shoot portions of the Hogwarts cloisters in the first two Harry Potter films), taking pics and enjoying tea in the oh-so-English tea-shops that abound in pretty little villages around the country.

On the road home from Lacock we got minorly lost around Cirencester before coming through the most beautiful village/town we’ve been through on all of our travels. The name escapes me, but I want to live there.

Coming through Bicester on the way home, we stopped at Bicester Village, which K had never seen. After wandering the stores deciding that we can’t afford anything there (sorry, we didn’t like the look of anything there), we jumped in the car and headed home, only stopping for the briefest of traditional post-tour stops at Borders and then a quick meal at a fantastically-valued but chronically unfriendly pub before getting home around 7pm, unpacking our things, changing the bed, showering, blogging and – now – going to bed.

It’s been a great weekend and it’s been really nice to totally remove myself from work for a few days. Now it’s back to the grindstone and on with the first of my 3 talks in 10 days.

The alarm arouses us both at 7am and we roll somewhat lazily out of bed, showering, dressing and packing an over-night bag to take with us.

I run K down to the hospital for an acupuncture appointment and head back to the flat to collect the bits and pieces we’d realised we’d forgotten on the way down there, most notably the iPod, which would have lead to some 5 hours of driving forcing Radio 1 on us.

I get back to the hosp just as K is coming out – impeccable timing – and we head straight off for Oxford. We get there surprisingly quickly after a near-miss with a mini-coach which decided to pull across my path while I was trundling along the country road at 60. We park up at St Giles and walk down the freezing cold street round the corner to Blackwells, the awesome pre-Borders Borders at the heart of the student world of the town. K’s never been there, so I delighted in showing her the wonderful underground cavern that disappears beneath the house-front of the shop on the main street.

We spend half-an-hour wandering aimlessly around and I grow slightly disappointed at the absence of a lot of the books that got me excited last time, although knowing how much I could have spent if they were all still there, it’s probably a good thing they weren’t. On our way out, we head up a staircase that I’ve never ventured up and we find ourselves in a whole new part of the shop with modern fiction (classed as anything from 1950-odd) and a brimming children’s section.

K finds a whole load of her new-favourite Jasper Fforde books – a necessary since I’d been nice and picked some up for her without realising they were an official series and so needed to come in a specific order. Order restored to her collection and a bizarre comedy book bought for our host this evening, we departed across the street so I could wander through their Art & Film shop, where I am torn between two books and end up getting one which will hopefully positively impact the production levels of the Live Life Then Give Life docs that we’re shooting through the year.

We wander back to the car through the positively freezing winter’s air and pick up a copy of the Big Issue from a poor guy who looks like he’s on the verge of frostbite but still has a cheery smile on his face and is genuinely grateful when we pick one up. We’d passed him on the way in to the town, but not had change and I think he recognised it as the classic excuse for not buying – he seemed really surprised that we’d actually gone back and got one.

We headed up to the Nuffield to get my bone-density scan done, just a precautionary scan to keep a check on how my calcium levels are doing and how brittle my bones may be as it’s pretty common with CF to develop osteoporosis and can be exacerbated by some of the transplant drugs I’m on.

Post-scan we head across the road (and round the corner a bit) to the Churchill to catch up with my CF team, who now I don’t have my port in anymore, I have little reason to see apart from the odd check-up or annual review. It’s great to see them all and catch up with the gossip including flicking through the slideshow of one of the physio’s weddings which was being planned when I was last incarcerated in the Churchill – it seems like such a long time ago now, it really is like another life.

Catch-up out of the way, we leave them to treat the patients who need them more than me and get on the road up to Bradford. The motorways are pretty clear, barring a little bit of late-afternoon traffic around Sheffield and we hit the M62/606 around 5ish, then whack the Sat-Nav on and hunt out Dazz’s place of work, where we drive straight past him in the street. The man collected, we head over to Shipley to his new flat and commence the warming of said homestead both literally (given the chill-factor) and metaphorically (it being a new pad).

We chill and chat and eat and watch DVDs and generally have a giggle, while I spend half-an-hour sorting some Live Life stuff for tomorrow in the middle of it. Dazz has also brought all his retro gaming North with him, which includes an ancient Game Gear with Lemmings on it, which keeps us all entertained for a large part of the evening as the conversations are punctuated with outbursts of swearing at misbehaving creatures hurling themselves to their deaths.

Around midnight, we all decide to call it a night and then spend an hour trying desperately to inflate Dazz’s new air-bed, which has to stand in for the sofa-bed which is due to arrive next week.

Eventually we flop into bed around 1am and near-enough pass out.

The day doesn’t start quite as early as I’d hoped to get up, but the alarm wakes me at 9am and I clamber out of bed and zombie my way to the kettle to brew myself a coffee in my swanky new cafetierre and drum up a cup of tea to rouse K with.

Once we’ve fallen out of bed and into some cleaning clobber we set about the flat. Seeing as we’ve only been in the flat for the odd evening and hardly any other time for the last week or more, things have been piling up, dropped off or unceremoniously dumped in the lounge, hallway, study and even the bathroom for want of a place to put bags down when we’ve come through the door and hit the sofa in “veg” mode. There is a lot to do.

We start by emptying all the Chrimbo packages and bags with gifts and attempting to find homes for everything, playing the DVD commentary on Pick of Destiny while we work. Halfway through the lounge, K reminds me that she wants to cook for the party tonight and requests I make a start on the kitchen so she can set-to on the cooking once she’s cleaned the bathroom.

I knuckle down the the washing up, re-organising and general scrubbing of the kitchen until it’s at least in a fit and clear enough state for K to rustle up her famous sausage rolls and more. Once I’m done I change out of my homewear into something a little more presentable and venture out into the big wide world to grab some last-minute things.

I start over at Mum and Dad’s, picking up a ‘script Dad had collected from teh chemist up the road from them for me. I stop and grab a bite of lunch (I’d forgotten to eat at home), then get way-layed by the sprawling mass of old photographs strewn across the dining room table. The ‘rents are getting their loft insulated (or at least inspected for insulation) and so have had to clear everything out of it.

Aside from the 15 boxes of stuff my bro’s squirreled away (ironically enough) up there, plus 2 or three boxes of my stuff and the same of their keepsakes, they’ve found a veritable treasure-trove of ancient photographs that show, among other things, that I was honestly and truly very cute once-upon-a-time. Knowing they don’t read this, I feel it safe to say I also found a pic of my Aunt’s wedding in which her husband actually had hair. Even Mum didn’t remember him having that much on top when they got married. Mind you, it was only 24 hours after my Nana’s funeral, so I don’t suppose Mum was paying a great deal of attention – it’s amazing the little tid-bits of info you find out going through old stuff.

Tearing myself away from Pa and his table of goodies, I left home with a hammer and some dishes to put dips in (we’re a touch lacking on the catering-supply front) and a bottle of wine for the festivities and made my way back towards home, aiming to stop at a local shop to pick up the bis and pieces.

The spanner is thrown by a text from K saying she needs all sorts of other things she hadn’t thought of when we went shopping twice in the last two days, namely the ingredients for Nigella’s Girdlebuster Pie – a desert so rich in sugary goodness that it’s sure to evaporate from any freezer in the country within minutes of the “ding” of completion on the kitchen timing clock. That said, it’s too cold for my overly-sensitive teeth to bear, so I have no idea if it’s actually tastes nice.

Once I’d collected the bits and pieces from the scrum that was Asda on New Year’s Eve as everyone tried to cram their last minute bits and bobs through the aisles, I headed back home.

Dazz had dropped in to say hey before heading back up North again for his New Year’s party up there and, bless him, ended up right in the middle of a veritable cleaning frenzy as we cleared, cleaned and moved things all over the flat to make it hospitable for the half-dozen or so guests we were expecting.

Once Dazz had gone and K had managed to calm herself down a bit in the bath (cooking brings on the fretful side of K, much like in her mother), I shot out to Maccy D’s for a nutritious evening meal to keep us going – with all the cleaning and cooking and cleaning we’d done, I wasn’t about to start cooking and messing it up even more.

Once we’d scarfed our hard-fought for junk food, K then turned my “no more cleaning” plan on it’s head by pouring half a jug of warm toffee over the pie and, in turn, the chopping board underneath it, then the kitchen surface, then the blender, then down the draws and finally onto the floor. It was a work of comic genius that seemed….well… somewhat less comic at the time.

Once the toffee was cleared and I’d remembered that I’d forgotten to chop up the veg stuff for the dips, I hurriedly set to it as our first guests arrived and the Wii was set up with extra controllers. Mid-way through our first game on Mariokart we were joined by the rest of the party and it all went swimmingly from there.

Most of the night was spent challenging each other and subsequently either screaming with frustration or laughter at Sonic and Mario at the Olympics, an insanely tiring game that essentially involves almost as much physical activity as competing in the Games themselves.

Once we’d all entirely exhausted ourselves, we settled on a more sedate game of Articulate, one of our Christmas presents and spent a good deal of time laughing our socks off at our ineptitude.

Without realising it, Midnight crept up on us and we flicked over to the last 15 minutes of pre-midnight musical fun with all the famous faces and those people you recognise and know you should know but just can’t place their names.

Midnight (and our leap-second for the year) came and went amid much hugs, smiles, good-wishes and clinking of glasses and the guests slowly ebbed away until K and I were left with the last vestiges of the clearing up before calling it a night just before 2am. We’re clearly not as hard-core as we used to be, but I’ll tell you something, I couldn’t have gone on any longer.

I blame the Wii. And Sonic.

We’re up relatively early again just before 9am, getting up and dressed for the trip to Guildford.

We leave the flat around just before 10 and stop briefly for petrol before hitting the back roads round Aylesbury to the strangely empty M25 and make the journey door-to-door in a little under 2 hours, which is pretty much a record.

I give my Godson, Li’l C, a big hug and say hey to the family, grabbing a cuppa and a seat in the lounge to catch up. It’s immediately apparent (it’s hard to miss) that they have just got Guitar Hero World Tour for Christmas, which is the Wii game that involves not only strumming along on an electronic (as opposed to electric, ie “real”) guitar but also comes with a second, base guitar, a microphone for vocals and, most excitingly of all, an electronic drum kit. Awesome.

Before the tea is drunk, C has set it all up and we’re jamming away to Livin’ on a Prayer, Beat It and Eye of the Tiger, which just so happen to be the easiest songs of the lot to play, especially for a mal-coordinated muppet like me. I may think I’m Animal when I’m playing, but I’ve no doubt I look more like a fat-faced ferret struggling wildly to free itself from the clutches of a peckish bird of prey.

Once we’d exhausted the ear drums of the rest of the family and I’d proven myself incompetent, we sit and grab some lunch in the conservatory before deciding on a game of Boggle to keep our brains going and avoid the mush-inducing Wii for a little longer.

We’re one game in and my phone rings with a number I don’t quite recognise. I almost ignore it, but then pick it up and am delighted I do as it’s my bro. We catch up and go over his Christmas (rubbish) and current plans (better) and likelihood of further adventures (slim, till R&R), before I fill him in on the goings-on of the fam back in Blighty.

I go back to the game and get my butt kicked by my 11-year-old Godson, at which point we decide to make the most of the fading sunlight and hit the hills for a walk.

Being the master of Geography that I am, I had entirely failed to ever note or notice the fact that Surrey has hills, but wow, are they beautiful. Today they were covered in a Dickensian rolling mist which obscured the distant towns and cities and created a timeless feel of total isolation – not a modern artifact to be found anywhere in sight once you’re beyond the car park.

We watch the sun drop behind the hills then repair to the quaint little village of Shere, which K and I instantly fall in love with and want to start house-hunting in, to a little tea-shop for hot-chocolate and cake.

We warm up enough to feel our feet and jump back in the car, heading home to round 2 of Guitar Hero, during which we each take turns to laugh our heads of at each other and I prove my ultimate smug-git personality by coaching K into managing not to get boo-ed off halfway through a track. I told you Eye of the Tiger was easy.

We eventually call it quits after an hour-and-a-half has slipped by without us realising and we head back up the motorway around 7pm. It’s similarly and amazingly empty as this morning and we’re back in near-record time, save for a brief stop in at Asda for some various bits and pieces, including some dinner for tonight.

K’s keen to pick up a new Wii game or two for the New Year’s Eve party tomorrow, but the games counter is closed so no dice. Instead, being on a sales-spree, we hit the DVD racks and pull out copies of In Bruges and Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, the latter of which we’ve not yet seen.

We get back to the flat (in darkness again) and I throw the dinner in the mircowave (classy) as K throws the D in the DVD player and we kick back and laugh our still-pretty-chilly socks off.

We the DVD’s done we debate throwing something else on, but decide that since we’ve got a heap of house-cleaning to do before the party tomorrow, we should really be calling it a night pre-midnight tonight, so we turn the TV off and hit the sack.

Although we sleep in this morning, it’s still a wake-up dictated my alarm-clock, which is getting slightly tiresome for a supposed holiday period.

The alarm gets us (well, me) up at 10am and I make K a cup of tea and take my Fosemax tabs – horrible things I may have written about before, which are supposed to deliver calcium-enriching…things… to the body to help prevent loss of bone density and Osteoperosis (and I’ll thank the medics reading not to point out that they’re essentially the same thing) but that require the tablets to be take on an empty stomach with a full glass of water and not to be followed by any other food or drink bar water for the next hour or more. They’re pretty nasty things and my stomach isn’t a huge fan of having a load of water dumped in it unaccompanied first thing in the morning, so I always end up feeling a little squiffy until I can eat something. Mind you, it’s better than not being able to run or do fun stuff for fear of snapping bones all over the shop.

We’re up and out of the house just after 11 to get to my appointment in Newport for 11.20, where I have a hasty blood test to keep an eye on my CMV levels to prevent any recurrance, then we head off into town to hit the sales.

I hate sales shopping with a passion. When I shop I like to look around, take my time and not feel rushed, not to grab whatever I can as I’m bustled passed the racks of goods by the ebbing tide of the sales-masses. Still, K wants to hit them up to spend our Christmas vouchers, so I tag along.

We start by finding parking, which is a mini-epic of it’s own, but eventually end up getting somewhere near M&S, a minor miracle. We decide to start at the furthest place and work back towards the car, so we hit the O2 store to return my busted Blackberry, but it’s rammed and quite clear that customer service is going to be a while, so I give up on it straight away – I’ve been using my old phone for over a month now, so a couple more weeks to fix the new/old one isn’t a big headache.

We make our way round to the Apple store, my mini-Mecca, but without time or the cash to stop and fully appreciate their wares (re: to buy their wares), we hit them up for an iTunes voucher, which they don’t sell in the range we want.

0 for 0 from 2 shops, we hit the soon-to-be-defunct Zavvi to see if we can gather ourselves some bargains in the closing-down sales. It’s like a zoo where they’ve let the monkeys feed the elephants in there and we fight our way around the DVD racks hunting out interesting pieces and debating how much we can afford to splurge.

We come away with a stack of DVDs and a couple of CDs and break out of the madness before it consumes us. I shoot across the Place to Waterstones to see if they’ve got a book I’m after which they do, and reduced by half as well, but when I get to the counter, they tell me it’s not reduced at all so, with the flashing totaliser of the Zavvi spend in my brain and the knowledge of an impending Borders trip, I pass it up and move on.

As K heads for M&S for underwear shopping and voucher-spending, I make a dash to the bank to pay in a cheque, then catch up with her in the Minotaur’s maze that is the Lingerie section of the ‘Sparks. Slightly bored/self-conscious of being surround by women sizing up and purchasing their unmentionables, I opt to head to homewares to see what we can pick up with our Christmas vouchers.

By the time K’s finished up I’ve noted a few options and we settle on a 3-tiered hob-steamer and a blender. Once we’ve paid and got out to the car, it strikes us how upsettingly grown-up we are buying things that are actualy useful with gift vouchers and being genuinely happy and excited about what we’ve got. We resolve to correct it by buying something frivolous at Borders.

We hit up the Big B and grab some cards for impending birthdays and babies, then K hits the sales racks while I go off hunting for the book I missed out on in Waterstones. I come up with nothing, but very nearly bag a whole load more DVDs before thinking better of it and heading back up to the till where I find K with an epic bag full of stuff she’s just grabbed, so I jump in the queue to get my solitary DVD, impressed at my restraint, and manage to pick up the right-sized iTunes voucher at the till point as well.

We shoot over to Deanshanger to collect the couple of bits we left there last week, including K’s complete Calvin and Hobbes set Santa brought her, and Mama D, like the classic Ma that she is, provides us with nourishment in the form of bacon sarnies after which, like the ungrateful offspring we are, we jump straight back in the car and head off again (we did say thank you, though).

We make K’s day by stopping in at TK Max on the way home and she picks me up a cafetierre – a present she had intended to get me for Christmas but then a case of crossed-wires with other family members meant I ended up not getting one. We also grab b’day presents for friends and then head to Tesco over the road to stock up on all the New Year’s Eve party stuff we’ll need for our Wii Party – crisps, dips and softies for those who aren’t bringing a bottle.

We head home, unpack all the bags, then hurriedly change into our going-out gear and head down the road to a friend’s 30th. Being pregnant and newly-installed in their freshly extended house, it’s an open-house affair and we arrive in time to see her family off from their day in the den, but have enough time to catch up with them first, which is cool.

We can’t stay long as we’re then off to a big Chrimbo meal with our friends organised, bizarrely, by the only one of us who no longer lives in MK. It’s great to see the whole gang again though, minus the odd couple of peeps, and we have a good giggle over some tasty Mexican food, even if they don’t know how to make a Caesar salad.

Our friend plus baby is there and K goes into broody mode, taking the baby away so that Mummy can eat her dinner, but loving every minute of it. As everyone is taking the mick and pulling my leg about the impedning pressure for sproglets, I’m forced to admit that I’m actually on the same page as K right now and am loving the number of baby cuddles we’re getting.

I take my turn and we head off to investigate the flashing lights on the Christmas tree (we don’t like standing still), then find an interesting plant that has leaves that are rough and not like normal flower or plant leaves at all, which keeps us interested for a good few minutes while Daddy finishes up his dinner and gets the car seat ready.

With baby out of the picture, we’re forced to interact with our peers once more and continue to have a good giggle. The meal done, almost everyone else is headed across the way to the pub for a drink, but with the knowledge of an early start tomorrow and a long day’s driving, we call it a night and head home.

We get back in and empty out some more of the bags while we grab a cuppa and watch a bit of telly before quitting for the night and hitting the hay, where I desperately try to get into my slow-starting book which I’m praying will improve. After a couple of chapters with no joy, I call it quits for the night and put my head down.