The second New-Year celebration saw us having dinner at Mordue's yard. Mordue, Kat, Stu and Chris (who together with me played in a punk-rock-pop trio back in the day called 'Mr Pan the Monkey Man'), and myself. We had tofu bolognese.

Kat told us about sky-diving and ate a fair amount of brie, Mordue pointed out that his kitchen doors came from Germany, Stu explained how hard-bop had preceded modern funk, and Chris suggested that we all try and recruit power trio bands through an online dating site and then set up some kind of bizarre battle of the bands...

Christmas is done with now - I'm onto New Year, and every year I like to celebrate New Year three times. Once with my friends in Leeds, once with Mordue, and once with Dan.

Here we are in Dan's yard, he has the biggest collection of DVDs and videos of anybody I've ever met. We watched Wayne's World 2 and saw in the New Year by discussing our comparitive neuroses. I say comparitive, but in fairness I out-neurotic Dan by quite a hefty amount. Evidenced by the fact that I have recorded said discussion on a website only hours after it took place.....

Thursday 27th Dec 2007 

On the one-hand it would be easy to explain our annual family Christmas party to the uniinitiated - Every available descendent (and various partners) of my great-grandparents on my ma's side together for one night of the year at Christmas to party it up - usually somewhere between thirty to fifty of us. Three generations rocking it up together with lots of good food, party games, and excitable children.

On the other hand - it cannot possibly be explained or comprehended without experiencing it first hand.......

Boxing Day - Already a slightly fuzzy memory. Spent largely in bed, or across at Stephen and Christine's drinking wine, eating cheese, and listening to Stephen's first attempts at post-rock compositions using garage-band on his Macbook. He asked me how to make it sound more like Vessels, so we went through the special effects and put distortion, reverb, and delay on everything. Lovely.

Then as the evening rolled past us, and the bottles grew emptier, we attempted to discuss the Middle-East. I tried to draw a map of occupied Palestine, but it came out looking like the triangular one from the Mr Men.

Christmas day in the Wright yard. A mission to the methodist church in the morning, where the minister's sermon was 'the twelve days of Christmas' rehashed to follow the teachings of the bible - "Four gospels, Three laws of faith, Two Testaments, and the Lo-ord Je-esus Christ", and then he made us sing it - I kid ye not.......

Oscar Peterson died on Sunday, he was one of my favourite musicians ever, and Night Train is an immense album. In tribute I put on an Oscar Peterson and Stephane Grappelli album whilst we ate the truly immense Christmas dinner that my mother and sister had prepared, which was far superior to the Sprout and Mango Curry I made the other day....

The picture shows my lovely ma, who rarely if ever drinks, attempting to understand the appeal of one of the finest drinks in the world, as a gesture to me on Christmas day. Suffice to say she did not grasp the delights of its bounty. She prefers Shloer.

Monday 24th Dec 2007 

Today was spent mostly asleep, catching up on the valuable snoozy time that I missed due to the previous night's extended partyage, and then once I had finally dragged myself from my lovely bed, finishing off creating my yuletide giftage (with some help from Clem, who popped round for a pre-christmas brew). This year I have made and distributed more gifts than ever before, although I can't say what they are, because many of you have yet to receive them. Suffice to say I'm very pleased with mesen.

As with previous years, I blagged a lift from Leeds to Durham with Kenny and his da (Kenny always works Christmas eve so one of his folks always come through to fetch him) which was a thoroughly pleasant journey. Kenny's dad even provided in-car snacks, although I gave the pork and ketchup sandwiches a miss.

Here is Sally the dog, in ma's tremendously cosy homely yard......