Christmas 2017

Well, we had a great time over Christmas, and I hope you all did too!

The rain turning to snow before midnight on Christmas Day and a white Boxing Day was the icing on the cake (pun not intended) with snowman-building and sledging thrown in. I should have put a bet on it being a WC as it could perhaps have helped pay for some of the expense.

A White Christmas! Woohoo!

Much food was eaten, much alcohol consumed (but not exorbitantly so) and much Christmas TV was watched, specifically Ernie & Wise tributes and the movies Gladiator, Harry Potter and Predator. Pressies were given and received and all in all the day was a success.

Extremely glad we didn't become stranded on a snow-bound motorway on the trip home as several other unfortunates did this year in England and Wales. Our thoughts are with all those whose Christmas didn't go as planned, with stranded flights, power cuts and what not.

I did no writing whatsoever, but I gave a copy of The Old Mice Killer to my mother as a present, after tippexing out the one F word in the whole book near the end at her request. Maybe next time if I self publish another book on Lulu I might upload two versions - a 'Director's Cut' and a 'Mother-friendly' version. It turns out she's now read it already and, 'after taking a while to get into it,' sounds like she quite enjoyed it.

This time between Christmas and New Year is ideal to start wondering about New Year's Resolutions. My resolution for last year  - Try Not To Be An Asshole - had moderate achievement ratings. I found that even when I tried to be nice to people, I was still inadvertently nevertheless being an asshole, or being perceived as an asshole owing to misinterpretation - probably due to the extrapolation of the all my Ass-holery of previous years - so I might go for this one again. Or maybe I'll tweak it to be more accomplishable: Try Not To Be A Total Asshole. But since I'm on the topic, other potential resolutions could be:

Write more

Exercise more

Eat less meat

Go to bed earlier

Get up earlier

Play more guitar

Study more Japanese

Spend more family time

Play more harmonica

Go out with friends more

Spend less time on social media

Drink less alcohol

Spend less

Buy less

Repair more

Spend more time in the garden

Take my own coffee cup to Costa

Yeah, those might be some good starting points. But how to keep them going after the first couple of weeks have passed ...?