On Saturday night I fell asleep in front of the television and remember stirring at about three o'clock but not enough to gather the wherewithal to move off the sofa and gone upstairs to bed. Something I had the vaguest recollection of was Mandi fiddling around with the Christmas tree. We are both back at work this week so decided that Sunday was the day to de-Christmas the house rather than wait until the 6th. To be honest I volunteered to go in to work on the 29th, 30th and 31st last week as they needed a skeleton staff and I thought I might as well; I didn't have to dress up and there wasn't any management around. It has been a long time since I have worked during the holidays and it never felt right when I was more of a Christmas person and even now it seemed a bit wrong to be boarding the tram at least two hours earlier than I have been for the last week and a bit. Of course I know that the emergency services and hospitals don't stop for Christmas but apart from that I can't think of a lot of useful entities that we simply couldn't do without yet choose to open. Having said that, as a smoker I am glad for the shops that do open and that's a good thing about city living, and if their religion doesn't acknowledge Christmas then why should they close? Anyway, when I woke up on Sunday morning it was in a totally un-Christmassy living room. This was Mandi's idea of not wasting the day as we might not have been able to find the time to do it in the late afternoon when we returned from lunch at my dad's house. This could have been Mandi's chance to wind me up that I had dreamed the whole thing and there never were any Christmas decorations because it is actually November. Would I have fallen for it? We will never know now.

In keeping with my attempt to not get stressed out about things I woke up early and 'pottered', which for me meant emptying the washing machine and putting some more clothes in (if you're interested I removed colours and put in darks), doing the dishes, and generally not recording this week's episode of The Sunday Alternative Podcast. I should have recorded this yesterday but couldn't be arsed. This week's instalment was the first of the year and one of those ones that get released as soon as they are finished, there wasn't an episode last week despite the fact that I had planned to do one but somehow couldn't find the time so instead tweeted a quickly thought up excuse. 

Please read my January newsletter here.

The Sunday Alternative Podcast #70 is available from here.

This week's episode of The Random Saturday Sessions with a fantastic appearance from The Idolins is available to watch here.