Holiday season comedown

Christmas feels like a distant memory. The actual festive week was spent in Suffolk with a group of friends at two converted farm houses on Partridge Farm. The region is famous for its fixation with food, and there was no shortage of really impressive pubs, farmers markets and restaurants. Aldeburgh is worth a visit for (apparently) the best fish and chips in the UK. We ate at The Regatta instead as the chef used to be at The Connaught. Might go back in summer to sample the fish and chips.

Christmas itself was spent gorging ourselves on smoked goods from the nearby Richardson's Smokehouse in Orford, and watching lots of movies. No stress. It rained cats and dogs pretty much non-stop but when you're in front of an open fire in a onesie no-one seems to mind. Actually that's not entirely true - I kept dropping food on myself and remarked that the onesie seems to be repelling food and my pal said 'It repels more than food.'

Just after New Year (spent in London - rare) we took the girls to Paris for four nights and despite a long list of 'must sees' only managed a fraction. I really recommend Paris in January - it's virtually deserted compared to London. We went up the Eiffel Tower and didn't have to queue (€16 for all four of us) - I had the best frites of the trip up on the L1 cafe. We stayed a hotel recommended on Trip Advisor for families - the Residence Foch. Get a Junior Suite aka a family room if you go - it means the kids are in another room with their own TV. We shut the door on ours and watched back to back episodes of Breaking Bad.

An efficient way to see the sights with kids is the Fat Tire Bike Tour - nearly 4 hours of gentle cycling with an English speaking tour guide (with the kids on a tandem, or if they're really small in a baby seat) for €90.

So, back to London and this year probably won't see much in the way of renovation as we're saving up to go back to New Zealand for a (long overdue) trip to see friends and family. One thing we would like to address is our front door though - I've got Anglian coming round to give a quote on Friday night. I've read about their heavy handed sales techniques but am optimistic that the sales fella will want to be anywhere than our house all night on a Friday night. Will report back!

Christmas 2012

After last the last two years of (enormous) real trees I was actually really happy to return to my fibre optic favourite. It may not make the house smell like fresh pine but hey, it didn't cost over £50 to get delivered, or have to be re-ordered due to arriving broken and because I've used it for 8+ Christmases it makes for an ecological choice.

It also makes for a lazy person's dream - just plug it in and viola, the lights change colour. The usual decorating effort requires four pairs of hands on deck and several hours.

I actually submitted this photo to the Camp Bestival Christmas tree competition where 95% of the entries are of proper trees (I'm sure not all could be from this year as some were submitted weeks ago). I was delighted when someone left a comment on mine saying 'That's the best by far :)' - not sure if he was being sarcastic or not, the bucket kind of spoils the shot. As does the messy pile of crap on top of the Sky box.

The bucket is there btw to catch those pesky intermittent drips, yeah it's STILL leaking but thankfully nowhere near as much as before...

Thanks to being burgled while we slept just before Christmas two years ago, we now double lock the doors when we're inside. Next year we'll replace the front door with a high security spec model. All our neighbours now have ADT security alarms installed too.

I hope our burglar is having a thoroughly unproductive time this year as people get more savvy about security. But I wish a very happy Christmas to everyone else!

Burglary a year on

(Wow that photo is a bit dark - it's taken from upstairs looking into the extension, to show the Christmas lights)

This time last year a burglar was settling in for the night somewhere in East London. It's a busy time of year for burglars, with lots of booty up for grabs and merry revellers not being as cautious as they should be. This week we heard of a local policewoman who had her door kicked in at 3pm and had everything taken from her home - presents included. In hindsight we got off lightly as our burglar only took electronic items and cash.

Only yesterday someone asked what the outcome of the burglary was for us - and I had to explain that we didn't get a penny of insurance because MoreThan are an unfair company. According to them, I should have double bolted the doors and slept with the alarm on - even though Rob was still out. Actually he was out til around 4.45am, and I would not have been a happy camper being woken up by him unable to get in. We have switched to a more ethical insurance company who mention that 'reasonable precautions' are made but none of the nonsense that MoreThan say we should have done. It has to be said, if you do happen to double lock your doors and sleep with your alarm on you probably won't need insurance against burglary, or fire for that matter as the chances of escaping in order to claim would be fairly slim. (Ok I am officially in a bad mood about this now - but thinking about losing £2,000+ worth of stuff that we had to replace despite paying premiums for so many years because of a ridiculous clause is irkesome).

Anyway - in other semi-related news: earlier this week the car alarm went off at 4am, repeatedly. It could only be reset by locking the door with a key and Rob gallantly made me do it. The same week one of the sensors in our security system decided it needed a new battery and it took 3 days of waiting for an ADT engineer to come round to replace it. Also in the same week, one of the wires on the garage door wiggled free which meant the entire mechanism wouldn't work (thankfully Rob has fixed it, for now). The theory that things happen in threes seems to hold true here!

Pictured above: Church Street in Stoke Newington, great way to spend a Saturday FYI.

Happy Festivus

Yowser, it's the middle of December yet I still feel in denial about the impending festive season. I blame the weather - this weekend kicked off with slight chill and a massive full moon rising (pictured top) which was visible through the night via our glass roof (yay), or rather it would have been if we were at home instead of raising all kinds of hell at a terrific party (cheers Tubbs! Happy birthday!).

The next night started with an impressive sunset, a dinner for 10 to watch the final of the X Factor and then out to another terrific party, where I DJd for the first time in public since June. Just goes to show that being jaded makes you play better as there was no shortage of lovely people coming to hi-five me mid set (that's never happened before).

And so, onto Sunday, where we hosted some Christmas drinks and mince pies and sat around our fake fire (yes it's a DVD)...

...and marvelled at the Christmas tree which now the kids can decorate by themselves (Result! And that's why you have kids)... so I guess it's time to start feeling festive. If the rumours are true and it snows this weekend then I'll be truly out of denial. Until then, I'm in an extended autumn frame of mind...

Christmas 2010

We bought a new PC last year and annoyingly I still haven't found my Photoshop installation disc. In the meantime I've been using a free online photo editing site called Picnik and they happen to have some useful effects. Like this one pictured top, which looks like all my childhood photos.

The tree is 7 feet tall, and we could've gotten away with an 8 footer really but as it took two hours, two strands of lights and 150 decorations maybe that extra foot would've sent me over the edge. Of course, despite the effort the tree smells superb and even better was the massive dumping of snow we had - the outlook transformed into a proper winter wonderland overnight. Magical!

Decorating Christmas

We haven't had a real tree, and thus a requirement for decorations, for about 7 years. I have a fantastic 3 feet high white fibre optic tree that plugs in and changes colour every few seconds. Easy. This year the kids kept banging on about a proper tree and I gave in. It cost £88 for a 7 foot high locally-grown Nordman Fir (and stand) to be delivered from Sussex from Catsfield Christmas Tree Farm.

Rob and I went to Paperchase and spent £70 on tree decorations (about 120 items FYI). The tree still looked a little on the naked side so I ended up buying a couple of bags of chocolate decorations, candy canes and another 10 pink disco balls to make it look more festive.




My favourite additions are the dogs, including the latecomer, the Shitzh-zu, donated by my friend who couldn't put up with my sad face when I saw she'd gotten it for her Secret Santa. Unfortunately, the combo of glass and drunkeness meant it got a bit of a smashed head. Sorry Jen.



My Canon Ixus 850IS has seen better days. I swear my old Ixus took better photos than this one. Apologies for the rubbish focus on these shots, but you get the idea.