Not Another Review Of The Year

It seems that the done thing at this time of year is for every editor of every publication to get his or her team together and ask them all to fill every available space with reviews of the year's "insert journalist's specialist subject here". Failing a review, a quiz will suffice and failing those there's always forecasting what's going to be hot next year. We bloggers are tempted to fall into the same trap and blog on the good, the bad and the ugly that has befallen us during 2010 but let's face it, is anybody really interested to know that we went to see twenty films and that L'Illusionist was perhaps our favourite or that Twitter was the best thing we got involved in during the past twelve months.


So I'm going to avoid that. No quiz, no review. So what the hell am I going to write about now?

Well I could start with the world's best snowman brought to my attention by someone on Twitter. Sorry I've forgotten who it was but, as you can see, this is a snowman to beat all snowmen and should go down in the annals of snowman history for the masterpiece that it is.

But instead, I'm going to devote today's musings to my wonderful wife Marion who has been with me since she was the slip of the girl in the photo at the top of the blog and has managed to put up with me for over forty years. Without her I couldn't have survived the past three week's experience of a hip replacement and the subsequent recuperation. She has had to manage on her own in the worst winter weather in decades and has single handedly coped with huge snow drifts and ice rink roads in order to bring some semblance of order to the Christmas festivities.

Here is an extract from her trusty notebook that goes everywhere with her and enables her to prepare everything with military precision. She's got things organised right through to next week and I love her for it. Let's hope that when I can walk unaided again, I can make it up to her for all her efforts.


I'm getting quite excited about Christmas now. We've got Marion's mum and our next door neighbour coming round for a bite to eat on Christmas day but the real festivities will follow when Paul and his wife Josephine and her mum Jenny arrive on Boxing Day and then on Wednesday when we go to St Andrews to visit our daughter Sarah and her partner Duncan.


I'll close by thanking and wishing a Happy Christmas to everyone who has checked in on this blog. I know it's all vanity and self indulgence but the statistics show that I have a small but growing band of readers and, whilst I have not yet returned to the halcyon days that came from our chance meeting with Britain's Got Talent's Greg Pritchard and ended up getting fan mail from the USA , I'm sufficiently encouraged to carry on. 


I've spent ages trying to find a version of this that didn't have embedding disabled. Watch it now as it will probably be taken down by Channel 4 soon.