Although I was up with plenty of time to spare, I still found myself in a bit of a rush to leave the house to get to the radio station at lunchtime. I was a bit concerned that the songs I had picked for today were still in my Dropbox folder when I looked, when they should have been automatically removed ready to put in the system at Trent Sound. Even if the tracks hadn’t been put into my music library I know my way round the computer system enough to retrieve the songs. As it turned out, Dropbox had fucked up and the station boss was out of town for at least the first hour of the show. Luckily, because I’m an obsessive note taker, I had the list of the songs I had chosen to play this week, so I took the rather drastic action of playing then through YouTube. It’s a good job that Gary was presenting with me because it would have been exhausting to have to do all that by myself. It was fixed just before the two o’clock news, so the rest of the show wasn’t such a worry. The good thing is that the listeners would not have known there even was a problem if we hadn’t mentioned it (honesty is the best policy).

After lunch we faced the inevitable task of taking down the Christmas decorations. As I said yesterday, it makes more sense to do it a day early and start the working week afresh. It is of course a task that nobody looks forward to on one level, as it means that the holiday is over. On the other hand, it heralds the proper start of the New Year and you can start to make good on your plans for the twelve months ahead. Preparation is key of course, so I brought all of the Christmas decoration boxes downstairs from my office first, which contained all of the ornaments and pictures that had been taken down to make room for Christmas stuff. It wasn’t as big a task as usual because we had taken the decision to get rid of several items, so everything was boxed away quicker and easier.

Don't be fooled by the bin bag, we are keeping the Christmas cuddly toys

I think it is nice to change the decorations every few years so as not to get too bored with them. Of course we kept the things with sentimental value such as the homemade items, but we binned a set of lights, the inflatable snowman, the inflatable candy cane, several cheap ‘fill the gaps’ baubles, and all the tinsel from every room. I had a bit of a guilty feeling putting Christmas decorations straight outside in the wheelie bin, it certainly isn’t something that you could do every year as we would just become one big festive landfill site.

In one corner of my office, it is Christmas all year long.

All that is left of the Christmas food, out of shot there's a plate of mince pies. We also had Christmas pudding and custard watching Sherlock.

It will be nice to hit the shops for new decorations next Christmas, or it would be if we weren’t skipping it.

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