FILLING EVEN MORE GAPS

'Twas the weekend before Christmas,

And all through the house,

Not much was happening

Bar the click of a mouse...

I'm still struggling to come to terms with the fact that it's very nearly Chrimbletide. Saturday morning arrived and I woke up at the usual ungodly hour and set about tapping out another couple of blog posts just for the hell of it, and watching a couple of the shows I'd recorded after I went to bed last night, shows which I knew that the Beloved would not want to endure. Those are things like "Qi" and "Have I Got News For You" which I persist with, despite her lack of interest, although, given that the former was a festive repeat and the latter was a clip show, she wasn't missing much as she slumbered on.

Then I popped out to the shops to buy bread, cereal and a copy of The Guardian (which had so many parts that it could have kept me amused until next Saturday) before making the morning cuppa and taking one up to her. I found her awake but still full of that wretched cold and so Saturday looked like turning into another non-event of a day.

I did, at least, help her to regain her appetite by mentioning the possibility of an egg and bacon muffin which I created shortly afterwards before heading out again because I did have a small but highly possible mission to complete.

This was to head over to the Post Office (in the next village these days), and retrieve one of the Beloved's parcels which had created one of those "red card" moments when I arrived home yesterday evening. That done, I got home, had a bath, realised that it was the 50th anniversary of the first episode of "The Daleks" being broadcast, wrote a short blog post about that, and went downstairs again to whip up a swift and mostly cheese-based luncheon.

Meanwhile, the Beloved sat and watched films whilst intending to wrap her Christmas purchases and I made myself absent after having commandeered the TV for 25 minutes to watch "The Dead Planet" just because I felt that I really ought to. It was, of course, also the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie tragedy which is, historically speaking, a far more significant event. I remember sitting in a pub at lunchtime that Christmas with a friend who was about to become an airline pilot (because I moved in high-falootin' circles back in those days... although I suspect that this was the last time I ever actually spoke to him, now that I come to think about it) and the mood being fairly sombre. This Christmastime has already been tainted by the sad loss of Ned Vizzini, an author whose works I was unaware of right until I first heard of him which was, sadly, already far too late.

There then followed the curious case of the disappearing tape dispenser which, quite naturally, vanished at precisely the moment it was required and which will no doubt reappear as soon as all of the Beloved's wrapping is done. Meanwhile, in the midst of all that frenzied activity, some of which usually requires a moment or two of privacy in order to preserve a surprise or two, I made myself scarce once again and went away to potter on the internet to try and cheer myself up.

Sadly, whilst I was attempting o do that, I found out about another telly icon popping off this mortal coil as I mucked around in TwitWorld as the death of David Coleman was announced which meant that another chunk of our collective pasts had broken off the glacier and melted into history.

Colemanballs no more, sigh...

Sunday proved surprising in a couple of ways. First, having found myself dozing off at around 8.00pm on the previous evening (such wild Saturday nights I have...), I actually got a good night's sleep for the first time in whenever and, even though I woke up at an hour most people would still call "unreasonably early" I had actually had more than four hours of sleep which was, quite frankly, more than a little bit astonishing.

(It did wonders for my word game play, too... with me finally posting some early morning Tweets which were actually borderline witty for once...)

Not too much later on, once the household had caught up with me, we bounded off far too early to the supermarket for our final (not really all that) "big shop" and found that the place was, surprise, surprise, already heaving, but then we rattled around, got the entire list, found a checkout with nobody in front of us and were home well before 11.00am.

It's a Christmas miracle!

We were also bearing more varieties of cheese than might be considered necessary for so tiny a household, but there you go...

After a frenzied hour of breakfast, coffee and gift wrapping, we then did our bit for the Elf Service and delivered parcels to the various parts of the North (Pole...?) which we needed to (receiving more cheese, too, as we did so...) and, after a short stop at mum's flat to pick up another pile of Christmas cards (sigh!) and a stop for petrol to keep us moving during the season, we were home by 4.00pm with no intention of leaving the house again until Christmas Day itself (unless it turns out that we got it wrong about no being in work this week, of course...)

And so, with the nights finally getting shorter, the evening rolled on with the Beloved having her annual Christmas viewing of "Scrooged" as I cooked the tea, with the plans for sausages and mash triumphantly being altered at the last minute to a glorious sausage sandwich, followed by a TV programme about Christmas drinks triggering (in that suggestive way it sometimes will) a sudden desire to crack one or two of the cans of Caffreys which we'd bought and put in the fridge after the miracle of finding them in a supermarket after months of believing that the brand had gone the way of the Dodo.

Sadly, shortly after that, the Beloved started with a migraine and so the last weekend before Christmas drew to a more disappointing close than we might have wanted...