Four Word Reviews: Christmas with MahaliaIt’s been the hottest April since records began, or something, with temperatures up to 28°C here in the tropical south last week. The flowers are out in force, bees are buzzing around and the sky is a clear, vivid blue. With all that in mind, then, I am unable to explain why this might be a good time to review Christmas with Mahalia, a 1968 album featuring ten gospel versions of Christmas songs with rich orchestral and choral accompaniment. But evidently it is a good time, because here we are.
Christmas mop-upAnother Christmas has died and been buried in the garden. The tree is crackling nicely in the fireplace and the leftover cake has been used to block up a hole in the kitchen wall where a pipe used to come through.
Let’s see how we did.
Christmas Dessert WarChristmas is nearly here. The season of eating a bit too much and feeling very full all day and still somehow continuing to eat Celebrations all afternoon. The season of Many Desserts.
This is the Christmas Dessert War. Pick a side and choose your favourite. Only one can survive*.
The candidates are:
I choose Christmas pudding with brandy sauce. And if you don’t want any I’ll have yours.
(* all the desserts will survive and continue to be available for eating)
Making ChristmasChristmas is a time for miracles. It is also the time for blatant commercialism and funny hats. That said, which it just was, it is also the time for ingenuity and improvisation.
This year Audrey asked for a copy of ‘The Lady in the Van’ on DVD for Christmas, the film based upon the book by Alan Bennett. It was a bit of poor choice really because the film is being shown on terrestrial television for free on Christmas Eve. Nevertheless, prior to being in receipt of this important piece of information, I still went ahead and purchased a copy. Neither I nor Reuben have ever read or seen ‘The Lady in the Van’ and so we decided, based upon the front cover of the DVD, that we would guess what the story was and write and illustrate our own version as an additional present.
It is called ‘T’Lady in T’Van’.
The end result was, quite simply, amazing. I cannot for obvious reasons include a copy here for fear of spoilers for the intended victim, I mean recipient.
What I can include though is a piece of concept art that Reuben came up with during the development process. He decided that the story should involve 80’s martial arts hero and general good egg Chuck Norris and thus drew a picture of him. This was then improved by adding three dimensional eyes.
Special doesn’t even come close.
Annual Christmas RoundupAnother Christmas has been and gone, so we’d better start wiping up the spillages and straightening the furniture.
Let’s see what Santa’s sack disgorged into my lap this year.
If anyone got more tea towels than me this year, I’d like to hear about it. But for me, the best Christmas present of all is my twelfth bean of 2015. It’s been a wall-to-wall bean-filled year for me on the Beans. Happy Christmas.
My Four PoundsI bought a thing off eBay for a Christmas present. It cost me some money, plus £4 post and packaging. That’s reasonable enough. I paid the money and entered my work address for delivery so that it wouldn’t be sent back if I was out.
What I didn’t expect – what nobody expected – was that it turned up at work the next day. The next day. In the morning. No postman is that fast. No courier couries that quickly. No delivery man deliveries so rapidly.
It turns out that the seller’s girlfriend works in the same building as me, on the fourth floor. The day after I’d bought the thing, he put it in an envelope and gave it to her. She brought it in and, first thing in the morning, handed it to my colleague. The packaging cost him a fraction of £4 and the postage cost him the square root of nen.
So naturally, of course, my Christmas is ruined. The spirit of Christmas is charity and giving, and this shyster’s used his unfair advantage to wangle me out of £4 for a service that was not required. The spirit of Christmas is dead. My festive joy and cheer have been used up. I’ve torn my decorations down and burnt my Christmas cards. I dumped the tree out of the window onto the roof of a passing van. I put my fist through the TV screen when the John Lewis advert came on. If Santa shows up at my place I’ll give him a thick ear.
The moral of this story? Don’t buy things off eBay. It will indirectly cause your landlord to charge you for repainting the smoke-stained ceiling.
Picture comments!Elena asked recently… “Can I html an image into this comment box?” The answer then was no.
The answer now is still no, but I have added a funky new picture comment tool deeley to the site, which might come in handy.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
(Don’t say I never get you anything!)
P.S. I got a motherloving bean, motherlovers!
Famous Award Acceptance Speeches – #47Transcript from the original recording – 3 August 2014
“Thank you, thank you for your kind words.
When I first started the Woefully Inept Plumbing Company back in 2001 I was told that I, Woefully Inept, had a stupid name. They told me that my name was not a name and that whoever had named me was an idiot. That really got to me; that two hundred people could come up with the same idea, the same awful joke, and that two hundred people would take the time to call me up, as they did back then, and tell me. It’s not as if I’d never heard it before. I had a difficult time during school, and those of you that are close to me will know that growing up was no easy task. I was the butt of a lot of jokes that swept through the school like a rampant case of man flu. I certainly did my time several lifetimes over, but I held on in there and I got my two GCSE’s in Leisure and Tourism and Graphic Design, and until this moment that was the third happiest moment in my life.
Pauses to cough and take a sip from a glass of water
My company was built from the ground up. It took a very long time for the public to catch on that the Woefully Inept Plumbing Company was not a description of the kind of service they could expect from my staff, that I was not actively trying to describe the poor levels of work that would encourage the likes of BBC’s ‘Watchdog’ to come and investigate us. I did not want to name my company after anything else but the very thing that had kept me going through the darkest moments. I am me and I am my company, and to name it anything else would be cheating myself and my family out of the honour of having a successful business.
Yes, we did not turn a profit for over eight years yet my fierce determination would not deter me from my dream. You cannot spell ‘determination’ without ‘me’. You cannot spell ‘determination’ without ‘dream’.
I am that me. This is that dream.
So to all those people who ever doubted me, to those that mocked the choices that paved the way to this very point, and to those people that still call and send humorous emails with mean and derogatory comments, I accept this award on their behalf. Thank you.”