Once again, I was up late. My office hours tend to be between midnight and six o'clock in the morning at the moment. I recorded The Sound Of Nottingham UK and emailed that over for this weekend, and then recorded The Maze podcast. Everything went well until I uploaded the podcast to the Mixcloud site for The Maze and called it 'The Maza' without realising. Because the title is the one thing that you can't edit, I had to delete it and upload it again. Having emailed a link to the site to Gaz at The Maze, I went to sleep for a few hours. Once awake again, and reasonably fresh, I checked my emails. The Maze podcast went down well, and I also had a good email from Nottingham Live. They once did a feature on Trent Sound that their founder Darren sat in with Penny and myself for, and he asked if I would be up for a feature on the American show, silly question! The possibility of some telly work also presented itself to me, Nottingham now has two local channels, an online one and a telly one that will launch next year. The online one will launch this year as a subscription based affair, which is a brave move as people don't tend to enjoy paying for things from the Internet. I suppose if the quality is there, then it will be worth paying for. After all, people pay for extra television channels. So with everything else, 2013 is looking very positive career wise, unless this is a false sense of security and these will turn out to be the best four days of the year.

At this time of year, I am delighted and disappointed in equal measure with the attitude towards the latter part of Christmas. There are still some houses with decorations up, but they are few and far between. In fact a lot of houses weren't decorated to start with. We are still fully decorated and lit up, (some houses still have the decorations but haven't turned the lights on), and watching the Christmas films. Last night we watched Miracle On 34th Street, the colour remake. I'm not a massive fan of remakes for the sake of it, but both versions of this film differ enough so that watching the colour version after the original won't be a waste of time. It's the same point that I made on the radio about covers of songs, merely recording the song again isn't enough, you have to put your own spin on it. The feature Louie Smells Like Rock and Roll proved that point, there were some brilliant interpretations of 'Louie Louie' and 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', but sadly most versions of 'I Love Rock and Roll' sounded the same. This is why Scrooged starring Bill Murray and others are worth watching if you enjoy A Christmas Carol. You know the story anyway so the outcome can never be a surprise. Each version that I've watched has a slight change to it, but hasn't deviated too far away from the story. Maybe there's a market for a remake of A Christmas Carol in which Ebenezer Scrooge decides he doesn't give a shit what happens to the poor, sacks Bob Cratchett, dances on Tiny Tim's grave, and buys the biggest turkey in the window on Christmas morning and eats the whole thing himself.

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