Four Festivities
On Thursday, I went with inkognitoh, silverjet_allie and Pete to the Barbican's Twisted Christmas show, which featured a lot of cool music, along with shadow puppetry, a culinary shaggy dog story, and Heston Blumenthal recreating the smell of christmas onstage. Which we were sitting too far back to fully appreciate.
The music was great, with Bonfire Madigan producing a version of Last Christmas which I really liked, and Jarvis Cocker singing about slush rather than snow. Foy Vance was great live. Ended with Camille O'Sullivan and Neil MacColl duetting on Fairytale of New York, with everyone else singing backing, in honour of Kirsty MacColl (who'dve been fifty this year).
On Friday it was the Loan Wolves Christmas dinner. Claudia had managed to get us a table at a cool Italian place. I had a starter which was basically a huge, delicious plateful of ham, sausage and cheese. Pizza was good, too. But we had an insanely hard job getting served with drinks, which surprised us - you'd think they'd be up for keeping the wine and beer flowing.
On saturday, I played host. wascally_weasel, Bryony and copperbird came round to play card and board games. Which we singularly failed to do. But we did have a good old natter. It was nice to have guests to see the Christmas tree and share mince pies with.
Yesterday was a christmas films triple bill at silverjet_allie's place. Half a dozen of us watched It's a Wonderful Life, Elf and The Muppet Christmas Carol plus the Charlie Brown Christmas special and a bunch of other shorts. Pete did a "Moviedrome"-style intro to each film, minx2012 had sent over some lovely mince pies, and a good time was had by all. Though Allie and I had issues with the way our trades (publishing and librarianship) are represented in Elf and IAWL respectively.
The music was great, with Bonfire Madigan producing a version of Last Christmas which I really liked, and Jarvis Cocker singing about slush rather than snow. Foy Vance was great live. Ended with Camille O'Sullivan and Neil MacColl duetting on Fairytale of New York, with everyone else singing backing, in honour of Kirsty MacColl (who'dve been fifty this year).
On Friday it was the Loan Wolves Christmas dinner. Claudia had managed to get us a table at a cool Italian place. I had a starter which was basically a huge, delicious plateful of ham, sausage and cheese. Pizza was good, too. But we had an insanely hard job getting served with drinks, which surprised us - you'd think they'd be up for keeping the wine and beer flowing.
On saturday, I played host. wascally_weasel, Bryony and copperbird came round to play card and board games. Which we singularly failed to do. But we did have a good old natter. It was nice to have guests to see the Christmas tree and share mince pies with.
Yesterday was a christmas films triple bill at silverjet_allie's place. Half a dozen of us watched It's a Wonderful Life, Elf and The Muppet Christmas Carol plus the Charlie Brown Christmas special and a bunch of other shorts. Pete did a "Moviedrome"-style intro to each film, minx2012 had sent over some lovely mince pies, and a good time was had by all. Though Allie and I had issues with the way our trades (publishing and librarianship) are represented in Elf and IAWL respectively.