Its nearly here!!!

This month seems to be flying by. I have finally finished the shopping and everything is wrapped and ready to go. Tom and I took a trip into St Albans and had a look around the Christmas Market in the grounds of the Cathedral. It was very pretty, lots of little stalls and lots of nice little shops to look around. It made for a very pleasant Sunday morning trip.

The market in the town centre was a general farmers market with the added bonus of a stall selling mulled Cider. It was very nice and warming!! 

Tomorrow will be the last one at work until next year, I must say I am looking forward to having a break. I suspect that it won't be too relaxed! The plan for tomorrow is to have our 'old' friends around for nibbles and alcohol. I like to go to Mass on Christmas eve, so rather than waiting for Midnight we are aiming to get to the 8.30 carol concert followed by mass, we should be home for 10pm!! I don't want to miss Father Christmas!!

I have had a great night out recently, I went to see the lovely Paul Hollywood, He of the Great British Bake off!!! My friend Karen, (in charge of all ticketed events!!) managed to get us tickets, we were expecting a 'restricted' view but it was in fact a perfect view!! Paul was quite an entertainer, kept a whole bunch of mainly women enthralled for the evening!! I think we were all so taken with his performance that it wasn't until afterwards that we realised that he only actually cooked one thing!! The rest of the show was Blue Peter Style...... here's one I made earlier!!!! That said it was a great evening and I actually managed to try a bit of his roulade Oooo errr Missus!!!!

The month of December is filled with nights out. I have had a fair few of them with friends. Our girls night was at The Crooked Chimney again. The pub is quite nice but the food is hit and miss. I went on line before we arrived and found a couple of vouchers, one offering free mulled cider and one offering £10 off the bill!! Our favourite waitress was there and looked after us well. A few years ago when we booked our annual Christmas dinner they were at pains to tell us that they would not be providing any table decorations or crackers, so that started our annual tradition of decorating our own table!! This year was not different, although we were provided with crackers!!

This month I decided to upgrade my phone, a foolish thing to do. It was the lure of a new iphone as the current one was doing what all iphones seem to do,that is reach the grand age of two and start to slowly die. The battery stopped holding the charge and I found that I was having to charge it overnight and during the day just to keep it going!! So stupidly I decided to swap service providers from O2 to Vodafone. I have been with O2 for years but they couldn't match the voda deal. I had really hoped that the transfer of my old number would go easily but  that was wishful thinking!!!

After speaking to half the people in India the swap finally happened today a full 10 days after they promised to transfer the number. Of course expecting that to go to plan was optimistic in the extreme!! Tonight by way of a change I ended up speaking to a chap in South Africa who finally sorted out the voice mail issue. The whole experience is not one I want to repeat in a hurry!!

I wish you all a happy and safe Christmas. May New Year bring you all health and happiness.