New year's eve came and went, a night I have never particularly been a fan of. Going out is never as good as you think it is going to be and you just end up waiting to be served in a crowded bar that has had the cheek to charge entry. We went for breakfast in Sherwood at the same place as last time, and did a few charity shops. My main purchase was a copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, another one that I bought full of intentions to expand my Dickens reading beyond the Christmas stories and will probably just end up on my bookshelves forgotten about with the others. My reading pile is bordering on the ridiculous at the moment with about ten unread books neglected while I am too busy to sit and read, and hopefully I will remain busy through the year ahead although I will be devoting a lot of time to reading and listening to music. By listening to music I mean for enjoyment, simply sitting there and listening to an album all the way through like people used to do rather than using music as background noise. It isn't that I don't enjoy listening to new music for the podcast, but it does seem to become part of my job and the last thing I want is for it to be a chore.
When my daughter Emily was a child (and I am now old enough to refer to my daughter being a child in the past tense) and used to spend the Christmas holiday with us, our tradition was to watch Christmas films until midnight and go out to watch the fireworks. Christmas party nibbles played a part and Mandi and I have carried this on ourselves while Emily is probably out at a party. We have a curry with all the trimmings while I watched Peter Cook & Dudley Moore: The Missing Sketches, a programme that suffered from an almighty amount of padding. While it was interesting to see these bits of work that suffered from the ridiculous wiping policy of the 1960s, the show relied far too heavily on talking heads and that horrible thing commercial channels do these days where half of the programme is 'coming up' and 'previously'. Far better was the Victor Lewis Smith documentary that was on a little while ago.
We haven't come anywhere near watching our collection of Christmas films, in fact we didn't last year either because we watch all my versions of A Christmas Carol. However last night 2016 fell away while we watched It's A Wonderful Life, a story with parallels to A Christmas Carol that I read deeper and deeper into every time I watch.
Nobody from Buckingham Palace has formally announced that the Queen is dead yet, at least if they announce it now then nobody will mention the curse of 2016.
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