As it always does, Christmas week came and went so quickly. We started it with everyone in the house under the weather in one form or another, recovering from either illness or injury. I was feeling a profound tiredness in my bones. I definitely need the next two weeks off work, living life in the slow lane in order to recharge my batteries.
We spent Christmas with my wife’s family in Ross-on-Wye. Usually we would stay at my wife’s parents’ house, but for a bunch of reasons we wanted to make life easier for everyone, so my wife found us a lovely apartment in the nearby village of Whitchurch that we rented for a couple of nights. It was perfect for us. There were only two bedrooms, but our boys took it in turns to stay either in the second bedroom or on the extremely comfy large sofa in the living room. The place was cosy, but only once we had turned on all of the electric radiators and fan heaters. It was a little shocking to see on the meter that we got through £20 of electricity in less than two days, considering we were only really there in the evenings.
Just outside the apartment is a lovely old clock tower, built in 1867 and refurbished in 2010. The information board told us that it originally cost £200, which according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator is £19,532 in today’s money. Given that the refurbishment cost £25,000, this sounds like it was a bargain.
Christmas itself was lovely, and it was great to be able to be with everyone but know that we weren’t imposing on them. We got to see all of our nephews and their families, and had some delicious Christmas food. It was a good time.
As well as going away for Christmas, this was a week in which I:
- Set my alarm early on Monday in order to get on my indoor bike trainer before a roofer was due to come and take a look at our house. It turned out that I didn’t need to be up so early as he ended up cancelling on us. After a couple of attempts at rearranging, we told him not to bother. Given that it is likely to be an expensive repair, engaging a roofer who can’t keep an appointment doesn’t feel like a good idea.
- Joined our neighbours for an annual Christmas sing-song in the street. Two of our neighbours organise it every year, bringing lyric sheets, hot chocolate, and mulled wine. I love that they do this.
- Had one of the worst meals of my life at The Potting Shed in Whitchurch. We booked the restaurant for dinner on Christmas Eve as it was a short walk from where we were staying. It had so much promise — a quirky barn conversion with a fireplace and lots of festive decorations. But the food was terrible. My wife and I had mushroom stroganoff, but the congealed nature of the rice pointed to it having come from a microwaveable pouch. The starters weren’t much better. The boys ordered steaks; our eldest sent his back as it was slightly underdone, but it came back with the consistency of a burger. We all decided to skip dessert as we knew it wouldn’t be any better. I get the feeling that this is the type of food that you used to find all over the UK, because the restaurants are serving people who don’t have a lot of choice if they want to eat out. Handing over £160 for what we had was painful.
- Got stuck driving up the High Street in Ross-on-Wye as the horses gathered for the Boxing Day hunt.
- Started watching the PDC World Darts Championship. Tuning in has started to become a bit of a Christmas tradition. I love the game; it has similar qualities to snooker in that players can start to overplay or overthink what they are doing, but it is much faster paced. Missing a few darts can be heavily punished if your opponent is on form.
- Reset an old iPad Air 2 so that we can set it up with Zwift for my youngest son to use on the indoor bike trainer.
Media
Podcasts
- Troy Hunt’s weekly update from the start of December has an excellent, balanced view on Australia’s new law banning under-16s from using specific social media platforms.
Articles
- Simon Willison has been cooking with Claude. I’m such an inexperienced cook that I think adding technology to the mix would just lead to disaster, but it’s interesting to read about his experiment.
- The Guardian has a great feature on “46 photos that tell the story of the century so far”. An incredible set of photographs.
Video
- Continued with Pluribus on Apple TV. We’re not done yet, but I’ve seen blog posts that react to the season finale in different ways, so I’m not sure how we’ll feel about it when we finish.
- Inspired by a friend who was doing the same, re-watched Coming to America (1988) with the family. My youngest seems to enjoy the same humour as me and stayed the course, but the others drifted away.
- Tried rewatching Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) courtesy of a friend’s Plex library. (It doesn’t seem to be available on any streaming services at the moment.) We gave up and turned it off as none of us were enjoying it. It’s a film of its time that hasn’t aged well. The whole Guy Ritchie ‘style’ seems so dated now.
Books
- Started reading Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov. I fancied some fiction for the holidays. This was thrown up at random by an Obsidian query that looks at my whole reading backlog. I originally bought the DRM-free ebook over a decade ago but hadn’t read it.
- I couldn’t resist a £10 copy of Photography: The Whole Story from our local independent bookshop. I’m not sure how long it will take me to read it, but I’ve made a start. It’s already fascinating.
Next week: Turning 49.
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