• Thanks Alice, we did have a good christmas
• We completed our christmas do-good-thing by delivering hampers for Jackson’s Lane to people who would otherwise have had no christmas lunch. The littlest pulled a cracker with a lady called Hazel with whom we chatted about the birds she’d kept over the years. One particular parrot she’d bought in Birmingham swore a lot and she told us all the detail of its sweary phrases. Not at all suitable (but it’s xmas!) for the 4&8 year old delivery riders. We also visited Pat in a huge house who had two carers looking after her and who fed her cornflakes Slowly from a huge bowl.
• My knee injury from ice skating is bad but I ran through the pain and the annoying collapsing thing it does to hit my 2000km/year running goal. Gonna rest it for a bit now.
• We sang Christmas carols and drank sugary hot chocolate at our local church on christmas eve after a trip to central london to see the gifted spruce. While in town we ventured to the waterstones and spent a happy few hours reading books on the bean bags, browsing the shelves and sitting making up stories in the cafe.
• Also sole parenting meant the eldest had to be responsible and take the youngest to the toilet. This resulted in laughs from the queue for the mens as the littlest described each step of how to go to the toilet at a volume that her dad would be able hear as I waited outside.
• It’s our annual festive roadtrip of the north, stopping in Barton-under-needwood, Bollington, Sale, Linthewaite and Stannington. It’s been suggested we should get tour t-shirts made.
• First stop on the tour involved a walk around Caulke with proper friends who played and shouted and quizzed and squelched and dropped footballs in lakes and retrieved them with sticks and brought thermoses filled with hot chocolate and coffee and made the dark end to the day feel magical.