One Woman Goes To ....

So Long 2008

Playing it out with a song I loved listening to this year.

To all my friends and family - Thank you - you all make it better.

For real

The sun is out and we are walking across hard frosty countryside. Occasionally we are joined by an inquisitive robin, bobbing about on the ground beside us or hopping along the low lying branches and twigs to take a better look at us.

We all seem much the better for being liberated. Humans from indoors and Christmas overkill and the robin from the tweeness of being a Christmas card icon.

Open 365 days a year.

Today at 10am the water temperature was 28c ,the air temperature 7c. If I said it was as warming as chestnuts,roasting,open fires.... that wouldn't be strictly true.

However it does have its' very own particular brand of glow making.

And if you didn't quite make it today, well it's open tomorrow morning... and the day after... and the day after that....

How could I have forgotten.....

Winter Wonderland.

And seeing as the BBC allowed 3 couples to go through to the final of Strictly Come Dancing I am not going to eliminate one of my existing Top 5 but instead stretch it to incorporate a 6th.

Consider this the extra Satsuma hiding in the very toe of the Christmas stocking.

My Top 5 Christmas Songs

Wham. Last Christmas.

Fantasic song. Fantastic video. M&S,Twiggy,Take That etc take note - yes they may all have shaggy perms with the boys highlights out bleaching the girls - and yes those are white octagonal dinner plates that Shirley is putting out like a very conscientious dinner lady but this is THE winter house party that we all want to be invited to.

Mariah Carey. All I want for Christmas is you.

For the pure seasonal delight of Mariah artfully frolicking in the driven snow you will have to visit You Tube as the official video is not embeddable. However I offer you the song and the lyrics which will be very useful for making sure you are word and pitch perfect for Christmas Kareoke. Take note, you are really going to have to stretch to reach that high ' you ooh !' at 3.24.

Chris Rea. Driving home for Christmas.

I used to have a job which involved driving many thousands of miles a year. In a maroon Mondeo. The only time I felt the slightest hint of the romance of the open road was December time when this was playing on the radio.

Brenda Lee. Rockin' around the Christmas tree.

My unfullfilled ambition is to get to go to the 'Christmas Party Hop' and dance ' merrily in the new old fashioned wayyyyyyyy'.

Band Aid. Do they know it's Chrismas

Again great video. They all look so young. Younger than anyone in Band Aid 20 and yet they must all be the same age as the original singers - if not younger.

Smelling of.....

My hope is that no matter how bad or grim things get that we never have to go back to bath salts. That horrible grit . How could we have thought that was a good thing ?

My favourite fragrance for all things bathroom is Wild-Indigo from Molton Brown. Just a tiny bit just makes the whole world smell so much sweeter.

In the nick of time....

I may have got to the party late but at least I arrived before the Watney’s Red Barrel, cheese and pineapple sticks and fun size bags of Quiglets.

As I was such a Jeff Buckley-come-lately I am hardly in a postion to get snarky about the X factor version. However it’s probably not the one I would click to download .

Nor it would seem would Elton John. At the O2 on Saturday night (v good) he declared what he would rather eat than watch X factor and it wasn’t his hat, not surprising for a man so proud of his hair, I’m sure he doesn’t actually own any. (Just to make that clear – I mean hats not hair – he so owns his hair)

Bit surprised then when watching the recorded X factor final on Sunday morning to hear that come New Years Eve Alexandra will be at the O2 - joining Elton John on stage.

I guess it’s welcome to the world of show biz .

Possibly....

......in secret talks with Simon to take over from Danni ?

To spend.... or not .

Writers of fiction are supposed to stick to one genre. It's why Joanna Trollope wrote Historical Fiction as Caroline Harvey and her contemporary fiction as herself. Readers have expectations and it doesn't do to mess with them.

This thinking can't apply to non-fiction. Otherwise the fact that I have just finished reading 'The Thrift Book - Live well and spend less' could not have been written by the same person who wrote 'The Shops - How, why and where to shop'. But it is. India Knight is the author of both.

My technical knowledge isn't great enough to know if 'being served bankruptcy papers' is the same as going/being bankrupt but it was this along with some more philosophical shifts that prompted India Knight's shift from Shopping 'my number one hobby' to sewing your own clothes 'amazingly economical and fun and provides the most enormous sense of satisfaction.'

She is very clear that this is not a book for the cheese parers. Which is just as well as her approach to thrift would probably have them as well as the tin foil recyclers take time out from paring and smoothing to snort with derision.

Most money saving or thrift sites especially the US ones go into incredible detail on how many $ or cents doing something will save or cost you. The nearest India gets to the impact of thrifting is to refer to the 'amazing amount of money it's saving me a month'.

The cost of fuel and sticking bubble wrap inside your windows is not what this book is about. The focus is on the fun and pleasure of doing things yourself. Whether it be cooking,sewing,knitting, growing your own and if you really get the bug - chicken and bee keeping.

Will I follow any of her ideas? A few possibly.

I aspire to her most 'expensive' money saving idea. The purchase of a caravan. Her's at Camber Sands. Mine on the Isle of Wight. Ironic as I don't think I bought anything after reading 'The Shops'.

However both books are very enjoyable. Thrift maybe the subject but India Knight is always very generous with words. This is her description in 'Thrift' of becoming conscious of waste -

'Little by little I became greener. We're talking eau de nil or chartreuse on a good day, rather than darkest forest green'.

For the parers undoubtedly green would have sufficed. Anything more an unnecessary extravagance.

I like that her word count is definitely still spendthrift.

The End doesn't always come last.

I have added another bad habit to an already long list. And with this one I am on my own as the only other person I know who has 'fessed up to this isn't real.

In 'When Harry met Sally' (still in my Top Ten) Harry (Billy Crystal) explains how he always reads the end of a book first. In case he dies and so never gets to know how things turn out.

That's my bad habit too.

Except that my reasons don't even have such dark and potent undertones. Mine are that I am lazy and can't WAIT TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS.

I start a book. Get a feel for the characters and what direction things are heading and then decide that I don't feel like taking the scenic page by page route to THE END. So instead skip to the final 4 or 5 pages where the unravelling,revealing and righting takes place and then having read that if I feel the need to know how it all happened I flick back through the book and find the key plot points.

It used to be that I got 3/4 of the way through before fast forwarding but now it's getting earlier and earlier.

And perhaps worse, reading Elizabeth Jane Howard 'Love All' ( Her 'Cazalet Chronicles' are some of my favorite books ever ) I started to feel that although I was enjoying the journey I was doubtful about how I would like the destination. A quick flick to the end confirmed my suspicions. No deep sigh of all being well with the world was going to accompany the wistful turning of the last page. So that was that, book abandoned.

I thought I was an End junkie. But it seems I'm worse than that. I'm a Happy End junkie. Pathetic.

All I can say in my favour is that I have never owned a pair of 'Days of the Week' underpants.