The great thing about Christmas is seeing people who you haven’t seen for a long time and indulging in appalling quantities of food, alcohol, and food laced with alcohol.

Over the festive period I was able to meet up with a load of school friends (one who has made a good case for me to visit Uganda), and for new year make a first visit to Leeds with some uni mates.

I have to admit, I really didn’t feel too Christmassy until the 28th, which was the first day I actually set foot in a shopping centre - something that usually figures much earlier in December and gets me in the mood. For some reason, most of December felt like it was masquerading as October.

There is inevitably a portion of time dedicated to watching TV while you let the Christmas Dinner settle - and I was entertained by the return of Shooting Stars and a Morecambe & Wise Christmas special in full, but disappointed with the 39 Steps and the return of Jonathan Creek. As the reviewer of the latter in the Telegraph put it,

In the end, by the time the secret of the original mystery was unlocked, the only room one really feared never being able to escape from was the one with the telly in it.

I don’t know what people use to review the 39 Steps, and maybe it’s my attachment to the book that got me a little annoyed, but chunks of plot were not just removed, but replaced. Saying this, I’ve never seen any other adaptions, so it’s hard to compare - I hear others are even more wildly different, so maybe it’s just a hard one to adapt. Admittedly, it’s not ever going to be a Bond action flick, but I would loved to have seen a more faithful representation. Maybe they’ll have chance to make amends in a production of Greenmantle.

I think I can safely say December has been the most ill month I can recall in the past two years. For some reason I contracted the flu twice (even with a flu jab) and then just after Christmas started to get pretty horrific pain at the back of the mouth and in my lower jaw. Due to odd closing hours and the fact my dentist has left the practice (as I discovered) I couldn’t get it looked at until after new year, but thinking I knew what it was (emerging wisdom tooth) I waited patiently to discover that I had been wrong. That said I was also extremely happy that I didn’t have to have anything extracted. I won’t explain exactly what it was in case you’re not into descriptions of dental loveliness, but needless to say it was pretty nasty but easily fixed.

This weekend I’ve been helping to construct a family photo book for a relative using Blurb.com. I’ve previously used Lulu.com for this sort of thing, but a different set of requirements was needed and I was immediately impressed with Booksmart, their platform independent book editor which has taken all the hassle out of PDF preparation. It does impose page layout constraints on you, but I can live with that for this particular piece of work.

Next weekend could be a trip down to St. Albans. Looking forward to it.

The photo is of my great-great-great grandfather, James Bligh with wife Angelina and his family. He and his son Edwin Bligh were both coach builders in Kent.

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