Archives: T.V.

My body decides that 6.30am is a good wake up time this morning and, as the room is freezing and the wind is rattling the door, any chance I have of convincing myself to go back to sleep is thrown out of the window, so I get up, close the window over lest the same fate should befall the lovely K1 and head downstairs.

I make myself a cup of tea with the penultimate tea-bag in the house2 and sit down to catch up on emails, news and blogs from the last two days since I’ve been out of the office for most of them. I promptly let my tea go cold and debate whether to walk to the shops but a) it looks freezing outside and b) I’m digging too far into the news blogs to leave my laptop.

By late-morning I’m all caught up on everything I’ve missed and have worked my way through two scripts that were in my To Read pile. I fire off an email of feedback to the writer/director of one of them, but promise myself a second read of the other, since it’s being pitched to me as a possible new producing project and I think it needs a more careful evaluation.3.

K eventually rouses herself and announces (shock of all shocks) that she actually had a good night’s sleep and feels rested and happy – not a common thing for K of a morning. She also informs me that we’re popping next door at 2 to give Wee C4 his delayed Christmas present that various events colluded to prevent us handing over pre-Christmas (or even pre-New Year).

Back from that we take a stroll down the road and pick up some tea and milk, then K hits the sofa to dig into some statistics homework while I clean up the kitchen, including mopping the floor from Thursday’s jumping cider incident (it’s been a bit sticky since).

That done, I head upstairs and have a chill out in the bath, followed by some relaxation, then make a few phone calls that I needed to catch up on, including chasing up a commission that came my way yesterday.

Phone calls finished, I try (and fail) to wrap my head around K’s statistics stuff to see if I can be of any help, but drawing a blank on that I instead fall back on my dinner-cooking talents and rustle up some griddled pork and accompaniments.

After dinner, K hits the sofa again and I head up to the office to check messages and update the blog. When K’s brain has exhausted itself and her mind is a whirl of statistical mess we play a quick game of Bananagrams before heading to the movie room and throwing in the original BBC STATE OF PLAY series, which K’s never seen. I realise I’ve forgotten just how much I love this show as we get through two hour-long eps back-to-back and could quite easily have stayed up and got through all 6 in one straight marathon, but I’m keen for K to rest up before Uni starts on Monday, so I drag us both to bed for sleep.

1. although that’s hardly likely as she sleeps like the dead once she’s nodded off [↩]
2. naturally leaving the other for K the tea monster [↩]
3. the first of the scripts is another project i’ve been producing that’s been slowly working through numerous drafts over the last few months [↩]
4. the neighbour’s 3-year-old [↩]

New Year started, as most do, at midnight. K & I were down at the Black Bottom Club in Northampton for the second year running. This year was a little different, with a rocking indie band as opposed to the more chilled jazz band of last year. Different, but not worse.

After seeing in 2011 we eventually rolled back home after a detour to drop S&G off at theirs around 2.30am. I drove, which meant sobriety for me, but K was not so hampered by the restrictions of driving laws and just about managed the stairs to bed before crashing out.

Being in bed after 3am, I was pretty disappointed that my body decided to wake me at 10am. Granted, 10am is a pretty good lie in for me, but I felt like I could do with at least a couple more hours.

I get up, grab some brekkie and make some tea and sack out on the movie room sofa to explore the 007 game K picked up for me this week to go with the free PS3 she got on her new phone contract just before Christmas. I get one stage in (the pre-credit sequence) before her ladyship awakes and comes to join me.

I shut the PS3 off and come downstairs, making us both tea. We opt for a movie and flick through the Sky planner, eventually settling on SAVE THE TIGER, a Jack Lemmon flick from the 70’s that neither of us have seen or heard of. Turns out to be pretty good, but halfway through K’s not liking it and heads off to catch some more Zzz’s. I finish the flick while updating the blog and being sure to pimp it on Twitter before shutting down to head up for some kip myself.

I realise as I’m getting upstairs that I’m not actually tired enough to sleep, so I wonder what to do with myself. I to-and-fro up and down the stairs, make some coffee and a cuppa for the not-sleeping-either K and leave her to try out her new Mario 25th Anniversary edition game on the Wii.  I head upstairs to the movie room and throw on WAR OF THE WORLDS as background while I do some stuff online.

No sooner is it on, however, than I change my mind and decide it’s about time I sort the DVD collection out. It’s been randomly thrown on shelves since we moved in August and it drives me nuts having to hunt out the film I want to watch when I used to be able to grab it from my stack without a bother in the flat.

I empty the shelves and discover I’ve got enough DVDs to entirely cover the floor and I set about constructing a heavily-geeked up system of storage, based on genre, director and other random categories.

Around 4,30 I finish up the sort, although still with minor adjustments to be made, and jump into the shower before we head over to my ‘rents for a New Year’s dinner of roast lamb with all the trimmings. Awesome meal down, we chill with the ‘rents and play some Bananagrams1 before heading back to ours and getting in just after 9.

K retreats to bed, nursing a delayed hangover and over-eating-itis2, while I jump on the corner sofa downstairs, legs up, old episodes of ED from Sky+ playing the background while I download the NYE pics and write this, the very first ‘new’ post on the combined archive blog.

I note my paunch staring at me as a look down on the laptop screen and realise just how important my fitness goals for this year are. The belly will be banished.

Despite aiming for a 2 ep max, I end up on the sofa until nearly 1.30am at which point, 5 eps in to a mini-ED-a-thon, I close up shop and head upstairs.

1. an awesome game that both Mum and I bought for presents this Christmas, based on our deep love of playing a friend’s version [↩]
2. a sad curse of my Mum’s extraordinary cooking [↩]

This is going to be a quick one as I’ve been up since 8 and in uni since 9 and am now flagging slightly.

Today was the first official day of classes for me at LIPA and I’m already assigned to work as an ASM on Wind in the Willows in November. As of right now I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing for the show because we’ve yet to be taught that bit. It’s really exciting to be involed in a show so early on and in one that’s going to be such a biggie in the Paul McCartney Auditorium. More details, obviously, as I get them, which may be soon or may – being a lowly ASM – be a while.

Today we’ve had a “Production Breakfast” that didn’t have any food (believe me, students aren’t fans of false advertising) to meet the 3rd year students who will be our heads of department on the shows we’ve been visiting, as well as a full TPDT meeting that takes place for all years of the Technical and Design courses at lunchtime on a Monday for anyone to call for help with any of their projects.

This afternoon was Essential Stage Management – a course that will doubtless be invaluable as it runs alongside our first placements within the SM teams – which was basically just an intro for this week and will become more detailed. We do, however, have our first deadline for a piece of written work, although strangely it won’t actually be the soonest deadline. Go figure.

All day, though, my thoughts have been with Jess, who is still struggling. LLTGL have been working really hard on Twitter and the web all day to raise as much awareness as possible, including their Chair Emily hitting GMTV this morning to plead people to help. There’s now a large number of celebrities supporting her and tweeting about her, but every single person who signs on the organ donor register could potentially save her life.

If you’ve not signed up yet, do so now, here, and if you have then make it your mission to talk to at least one person every day this week about organ donation, Jess and how to sign up. If you are on Twitter, don’t forget to add #savejess to any and all of your tweets this week so we can get #savejess into the trending topics list and raise the profile even higher.

So today was the culmination of months of work from on of the LLTGL advocates, Holly Shaw, who’s been taking part in the Channel 4 young people’s campaign show Battlefront pushing Organ Donation. Her campaign – Be A 2 Minute Hero – based on the idea that it takes 2 minutes to sign the organ donor register, the same time it takes to make a decent cup of tea, has really captured the attention of many, many people.

Today alone the online registrations for the organ donor register have increased from the usual average of 200 a day to 3,200! That’s simply insane. It’s one of the biggest jumps the ODR has ever seen online. Not only that but since 1st April, the average sign up rate has risen from 200 per day to nearly 600 per day, another astonishing figure. Of course, the average number increase may be coincidence as it’s not 100% provable, but it’s a pretty staggering coincidence if it is.

Holly has been working incredibly hard for us since before we were a charity so to see her a) well enough, post-tx, to carry out such a massive campaign and undertake such massive amounts of work and b) brave enough to do it all on live TV and recorded for a Channel 4 doc when she wouldn’t even do pre-recorded media when she joined us is absolutely fantastic.

I went down to London after my day on the Easter Project at the Grove (more of which later in the week when I get chance to draw breath) to join the team for a celebratory drinks event to round out the day.

I arrived at 7.30 after a mamouth journey thanks to the frankly apalling service on London Midland, which I won’t get into here because this is a post about Holly and not some total failure of a train company who are staffed by incompetants and provide the worst customer service since Basil Fawlty but without the humour. When I got there the lady in question wasn’t actually there, having been whisked off to the Sky News studios to do a live interview about the day.

This was far from her first media coup for the day, having convinced the Metro to replace the “O” in their masthead with a heart and include a major organ donation story with photo to promote the day, as well as sitting on the sofa with Ben Shepard on this morning’s GM:TV and seeing articles either in or headed for both the Guardian and the Mirror.

When she got back, she also revealed that she’d had a phone call suggesting she look on the PM’s website where, sat at the top of the front page was a headline leading to this article on his support for her campaign. If that’s not a coup, what is?

It was a great evening for mixing, networking and general back-slapping for Holly and her Battlefront team, including Emily from LLTGL who provided invaluable support both in kicking the campaign off just after Holly had her transplant and latterly in seeing the Donor Day through with her all day in Canary Warf.

Holly’s Helpers all over the country set up Donor Desks in their local areas and the numbers from NHS Blood & Transplant go to show just what a difference they all made. It’s an astonishing achievement and I for one am hugely proud.

So, if you’re not already, stop reading this and be a 2 Minute Hero – put the kettle on and sign the organ donor register. Now.

LOVED the snow today. Kati was off Uni as there was no transport whatsoever in London, which was pretty cool. I shot over to the ‘rents very gingerly this morning, trying to catch Gramps before he left for home, but failed as he wanted to get going in case the weather got worse.

Stayed and had breakfast (I left in a hurry) and coffee, then played a little Wii with my bro before dropping him at the station.

Worked all afternoon on various bits and pieces, but since most people work in London it limited an amount of what I could get done.

K and I ventured out to Tesco to grab some dinner stuff since our cupboards were Old Mother Hubbard’s and while we were there we had a little too much fun with snowballs and decided rather than going home we’d go play. We phoned K’s bro nearby, but the kids were showered and changed and not allowed out again, so we phoned S&S instead and decided that we could still play because we’re grown-ups, which means we can do what we like.

So after swinging by KFC for a snow-bound dinner, we headed to the S&S house, wolfed our food down and headed for the play-park, where the game of Snowball Chicken was promptly invented while K built a snowman.

I ran around a lot and felt a little bit sick from bending down constantly to gather snow up, but that’s OK because I’m a grown-up. I also broke the back of the snowman’s head off by mistake when I was trying to make him a better eye socket. That wasn’t quite so OK as K had spent a long time on him and it was bad. I did repair him, though.

We meandred back to the house and tried to make a smiley face from snowballs on the wall, but it looked more like the wall had a nasty case of albino chicken pox. Oh, well.

We got back home, showered and changed and settled on the sofa to catch up with a ton of stuff we’ve got recorded on Sky+, watching A Short Stay In Switzerland, the BBC film about assisted suicide based on a true story. It’s a cracking film with great performances but an unfotunately clunky script.

Suitably teared-up, we head to bed around 11pm and I sack out pretty quickly.

I wake up at some point in the morning, fairly late if I remember rightly, seeing as I’ll be hardly getting any sleep over the next few days, and I lounge around for what’s left of the morning before a friend pops over from to fill me in on her current term at uni. It sounds spectacularly unimpressive and, since she’s doing a film course and is both talented and passionate, I do my best to convince her without saying it explicitly that she should jack it in and come work with me. (OK, maybe saying it straight-out…).

In my defence (if it is one), I would love to work with her and I really don’t see any value in degrees in Film anyway, but she knows that already so it’s hardly a clincher. I think she’ll stick it out, which is probably the grown-up, sensible thing to do, so I’m not too disappointed.

As she leaves, I head out with her and jump in my car across Keynes to meet Dad in a pub half-way between him and me for a spot of lunch and friendly (free) legal advice. In fact, considering he paid for lunch, I think it must be the first time a lawyer has technically paid to be able to dispense advice. Families, eh? They turn everything on it’s head.

Once we’re done, I head back home and chill with K for a while, then jump on my email to catch up with things and square away the few bits and pieces of LLTGL stuff I need to deal with, since I won’t be back at my desk before the meeting on Saturday.

That dealt with, I sort out some dinner for us both and we eat and chill in front of the TV to some Sky+’d something or other and then hit the sack relatively early, although we end up reading and talking until nearly midnight. Given the few days I’ve got coming up, I should have slept earlier, but it’s fun when you get chatty in bed, so I tend to be terribly ill-disciplined about it.

Today is the first day in a long, long time that I can remember not having to set an alarm or otherwise being awake before a sensible hour and it’s wonderfully delightful. I rouse around 10.30am and roll out of bed, leaving K to doze a bit while I catch up on the blog.

I head to the loo and to make coffee and discover that K’s been awake for over an hour and has been sat in bed reading, having heard the typing and thought I was busy writing proper stuff (rather than a pointless blog). I feel bad, as we could have had a nice lie in together, so I head to the kitchen, make us a tea and a coffee and then grab K’s laptop from the living room and we settle into the bed to watch the ITV-Catchup of Ben Shepard’s new Krypton Factor re-do.

It’s actually pretty similar to the old one and just as entertaining, although I’m annoyed that they’ve dropped the flight-simulator round from it in favour of an extended obstacle course. I still can’t do most of the tasks – at least the mental ones you can do from the sofa. I’m sure I’d rock at the ones you can’t try from home.

Once we’ve watched that and a couple of other bits and pieces, we drag ourselves out of bed and get showered and dressed to pop over to Mum & Dad’s to catch the football – Saints playing Man Utd on Setanta.

Sadly, it’s not the world’s most legendary game. An upset was never really on the cards, but we acquitted ourselves well given the fact that we had a man contentiously (although, I argued rightly) sent off and a penalty that really, truly wasn’t given against us, too. 3-0 is by no means an embarrassment to the kids who make up the modern Saints team, but it’s still disappointing.

After the footie we hang around for a dinner party with some of the ‘rents friends, which is really nice as I’ve not seen many of them for quite a while.

While Mum’s getting ready to serve, we get a call from Tim, which brightens everyone’s mood, then we sit down to eat and by the end of the meal (and the wine) the discussion is getting deeper and deeper into the politics of Afghanistan, America, the UK and the Taliban and everyone’s inter-relationships with Pakistan and other places.

I feel a bit out of my depth, as I often do in political discussions, but I still wade in with my opinions, mostly gleaned from things I’ve heard through other people, particularly my bro. It’s interesting how people’s views can differ so vastly and it just served to highlight the fact that none of us really know what’s going on over there.

We head off about 9.30, on the hunt for an early night. We drop one of Mum’s friends home on our way past, drive through a massive flood which seemed entirely out of keeping with the current amounts of rainfall, then get home, jump into comfy clothes and sit in front of The Recruit on TV for a while, until I’m too tired to stay awake and I call it a night.

Still awake at 6.30am, I decide it’s not worth sleeping, at least until I’ve taken my Tac, which I’ll need to grab in a couple of hours as it’ll just make me feel worse, so I pootle around the house doing not very much and watching Rocky Balboa still.

K wakes up about 10.30 and joins me in the living room, where I’m busy working on a short film script I’m hoping to put into preproduction next week for a mid-Feb shoot. K showers and has breakfast while I work on her computer (I couldn’t be bothered to move through to the study to work on mine, plus I’m enjoying having the TV on in the background while I work), then I trade the computer for the bathroom and relax in a deep, hot bath to try to revive myself.

We head out about 12 and pop to the shops to grab some flowers for our hosts for lunch and pick up a Christmas pressie package from the Post Office depot in Bletchley, before heading over to Li’l R’s for lunch with him and the fam.

We have a gorgeous lunch of slow-cooked beef which just comes apart at the touch of a fork and truly melts in the mouth, before enjoying a 2-course desert. After lunch we watch the most random comedy sketch in the world which has us all in hoots of laughter. The family have just been to Sweden and apparently this ancient 50’s or 60’s comedy sketch is traditional viewing over Christmas for almost all of Scandinavia. I’m amazed we have never seen it here and am determined to track it down.

I say “track it down” but it only takes a perfunctory YouTube search to come up with this – absolute genius. While we’re on YouTube, we are also shown a few other gems of random content, including this masterful Harry Potter homage/fantasy/mickey-take.

We get up from the sofas and head back to the dining room where we play a game of Humbugs, the most embarrassing game in the history of the world (even more so than Charades) and then Boggle while we wait eagerly for the anouncement of the new Doctor to replace David Tennant.

We sit and spend the majority of the programme trying to second-guess it, ut we’ll all entirely wrong. Matt Smith is a shock at first, looking slightly “individual” as he does, but listening to the interview and remembering his performance in Party Animals, a favourite show of mine that I sadly missed a lot of and has never returned, I think he could be an inspired choice.

The most important thing about him, I think, is that he’s going to be happy to risk things and take his own line with it, not try to follow anyone else’s footsteps. It must be incredibly hard to join a series like this after two powerful and individual performances like Tennant’s and Christopher Eccleston’s, but I think Matt Smith my have the right angle on it to make it his own.

That said, I do think he’s going to end up being a Marmite doctor – you’ll either love him or hate him.

We head off after the prog and get home to chill out for the evening, trying to put on Ben Shepard’s new Krypton Factor, but our Sky+ went screwy so we don’t have it. We fall back on the Top Gear Vietnam special, which gives us a good, pre-bed giggle, after which we hit the sack early and cuddle and chat until 10ish, when we both break out a book (how exciting) although I only get a few pages through before my eyes start closing, hardly surprising given I’ve only had an hour’s sleep from the last 36 hours.

New Year’s Day starts with an alarm call at 8.30 before I decide that actually I don’t really need to do what I was planning on doing, so I turn it off and sleep again.

I wake for real around 11 and grab some grub and take my tac before showering and dressing. I’ve got a cracking headache, which is a little weird as I’m fairly sure I didn’t drink that much.

I sit and chill for a while with K, then head off to the cinema to catch both parts of Steven Soderbergh’s new 2-part Che Guevara biopic.

It’s an amazing, epic, 4-hour film with a 15 minute intermission in the middle. The cast is all great although it is doubtful whether anyone will notice anything beyond Benecio Del Toro masterful incarnation as the Argentinian.

My only gripe is with the second part of the film which is, ironically, the part I enjoyed the most of the two, when there is a little more “star” casting, including Joaquim de Almeida and Franke Potente, neither of whom anyone else may have heard of, but they really dragged me out of a picture which has cast largely unknowns to people the Guerilla world. The worst of all, though, is a completely incongruous and potentially ruinous cameo from Matt Damon.

I know Steven Soderbergh and his love fro slipping his friends into his films and often it makes no difference, or actually serves to emphasise the comedy of a moment or simpy provide an amusing distraction. In a film as grounded and reality-based as this, however, it does nothing to serve the story and only helps to completely remove the viewer from the experience by forcing them to wonder if that really is Matt Damon playing a Spanish-speaking German priest. Silly and pointless.

Still, as a whole the two pics are utterly remarkable, even more notable for the speed with which is was shot and released, in time for the 50th Anniversary of the sucessful Cuban revolution that saw Castro’s rise to power.

Part One deals with that revolution itself, the initial beginnings through to the near-mythical battle of Santa Clara when power was finally rested from the Batista Government.

Part Two deals with Che’s failure to repeat the victory when he tried to take the revolution into Latin America via Bolivia, where he would eventually meet his untimely (or extremely timely, depending on your view, I suppose) death.

The first part cuts brilliantly between a “modern day” interview in New York on the eve of Che’s speech to the UN about the revolution in 1964, looking back on his view of the events in the revolution, meaning that Che himself sets his own story in context as we watch the flashbacks to the revolution itself. It seemed a little hackneyed to me – an over-used storytelling device designed to showcase the fact that Soderbergh can distinguish two ears with different camera work and visual styles, something we already know he can do masterfully from Traffic. As the film wears on, though, and as we edged into territory I didn’t have knowledge of, having a narrator, albeit a potentially biased one, really helped solidify the impact of what the revolutionaries were trying to do and what their philosophy was.

The second part is much more linear in structure, covering just his time in Bolivia from his arrival and assimilation into the just-beginning revolutionary movement, to the start of the failed revolution itself and his journey from there to his death in 1967. It’s a more coherent “war” film that shows much more clearly the dangers that Che and his men faced as members of a revolution doomed to fail largely thanks to the interference of the US Government to prevent any further anti-American dictators seizing power and turning against them as Cuba had.

I love Steven Soderbergh’s films and I’d sit through pretty much anything he does (except, maybe, Ocean’s 12 again), and I’m aware that my bias may well colour my judgement on this one, but I still think it’s a remarkable piece of contemporary filmmaking which stands a very good chance of becoming a defining portrait of one of the greatest legends (and urban legends) of the modern age.

After the flick I drop a friend off at theirs before heading to Kati’s Bro 2.2’s open house party, where I find all the gusts huddled round the Wii in the living room. I’m not there for long before I’m whisked outside by new Nephew to see his new bike – a 125cc scrambler that he’s immensely proud of and which we sit in the cold and tinker with for half-an-hour or so before saving our freezing butts and succumbing to the Wii.

I still have a huge headache, which is concerning me, as it seems like more than a hangover which, when I do get them, usually last no longer than an hour or however long it takes me to rehydrate myself. When we leave Bro’s I discover that K’s not feeling good either, so we wonder if it’s something we’ve eaten as opposed to the drink (K definitely didn’t drink a lot) or maybe just exhaustion from all that we’ve been getting up to.

We swing by KFC on the way home to grab some food as we’ve not got anything in, then head home and crash out on the sofa. I make a few phone calls to pass on my bro’s thanks to everyone for his Chrimbo pressies, then we settle in front of the 2-hour special Jonathan Creek, a show we both used to be addicted to as kids, only to find that it wasn’t near as good as it used to be (always the way) before calling it a night.

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.