Dark and windy night

It was the night of Christmas. Some might call it Christmas night. Not Christmas Eve, but Christmas Day night.

This is getting complicated. It was yesterday.

The Nunn family was a bit merry. We had all eaten plenty, watched the baby zoom around on her new horse/trike combo, watched her open approximately 300 presents, and played a rousing game or two of the card game, Cheat. (Every year my 90 year-old grandma pretends to forget the rules and hustles us shamelessly. We never learn.)

The baby was fast asleep, and at about 9 p.m., Jack - my brother - brought through to the living room a massive plate of cheese: camembert, gorgonzola, cheddar... more cheese than you could shake a mouse at.

Too much food was already nestling in my tummy. I was too full to move. I let out a silent (but ultimately apparently quite violent) large fart.

"Oh!" shouted Mrs Nunn, who was sitting to my right. "That cheese smells awful."

I stifled a giggle. I thought she'd drop it.

"Which cheese is that, Jack? Let me smell your cheese!" The giggle was no longer stifled. TheBloke (TM) didn't know why I was laughing. Jack passed her the cheese plate.

"It's not this cheese," she said, sniffing the camembert.

I started laughing quite openly out loud.

"Nope, not this," proclaimed Mrs Nunn, after taking a big whiff of the cheddar.

I was almost hysterical with laughter sobs wracking me in half. I whispered, through guffaws, to TheBloke (TM) that I'd just - for want of a better phrase - cut the cheese.

Mrs Nunn was not to be disturbed. "I don't think it's this cheese either," she said, taking a great lung bucketful of the gorgonzola. "My word, something smells awful. It smells like old feet!"

By this point TheBloke (TM) was also giggling.

Mrs Nunn hoovered up one last huge breath of the fart cloud that was surrounding her. "Hmm, that's odd," she said. "It seems to have passed."

Sorry Mum. And thanks for hoovering up my flatulence.

Ganging up

I don't talk about my job much. This is for the very good reason that the views I express here are almost certainly not that of my employer. It is - for example - unlikely that they would have such strong feelings as I do about Dairy Milk chocolate or that twat Postman Pat.

It's not a total secret. Anyone half-interested could probably work it out by looking on Linked-In, but the point is, this is categorically not a blog about my work.

However.

Part of my job has involved the design and delivery of training courses - specifically related to process improvement, which is sort of my background. Last week - after three years of delivering the same course on a monthly, and sometimes a weekly (and once, in New York, a daily) basis, it is looking like the course will be retired. I wrote the course. It's brilliant, even if I do say so myself.

For any of you who have written training courses (probably a niche section of my readership), you know it can get a bit fatiguing. You need to make sure you mix up the learning, so there's a good mix of practical and theory, and so you appeal to people with lots of different learning styles. It's tiring. So when there's an opportunity to pop an in-joke into the workbook, well, you have to take it, don't you?

Another thing about me - it's no secret I'm a Press Gang fan; I have been since 1989. I even went to the conventions in Liverpool. (You can throw your rotten fruit now). So, to those of you in the know, the following page from my Process Improvement workbook may amuse.

For those of you not in the know, the names in the "Who" column of my simple-yet-effective action plan (no falling asleep at the back!), has contained the names of three major Press Gang characters for the last three years! Three years! I totally got away with it.

The final part of my training course was an hour-long session where delegates plan their own process improvement workshop to run back in their workplace. At this stage I quite often get complicated questions about how this will apply in some obscure part of the business that makes very little sense to me. Luckily, I am fantastic at blagging my job, so this is rarely a problem.

"Laura?" someone called for my help. I went over to the desk. They were pointing at the Action Plan page.

"Did you write this training course?" Oh good, a critic. This happens occasionally. They are always wrong. And yes, thank you, I can take feedback. So long as it's uniformly positive. But a quibble? On my last ever training course? Too cruel.

"Yes, yes I did."

Still pointing at the Action Plan page, he said, "These are characters, aren't they? From Press Gang? I was such a massive fan! I have the DVD box set."

"Oh my God," me too, I said in a voice that definitely wasn't at all squealy. "Did you go to the conventions?"

"No."

There was an awkward silence. And then it went on a bit longer. I had to say something.

"Everything OK with your workshop plan?"

"Yep."

It seems fitting I got rumbled on my last ever session. And now I shall look for other ways to crowbar obscure references into my day job.

My life is not empty. Shut up.

And happy Christmas.

Mistletoe and whine

December is upon us and the ground outside is white. Not with snow - not yet this year, but with a thick hibernal frost. And with December comes Christmas. The baby is massively overexcited by the Christmas tree (mostly the opportunity to remove decorations and throw them on the floor repetitively). Our Christmas tree is quite pretty from the top down, to about two feet off the floor, where it has been stripped entirely of glittery ornaments by one over-enthusiastic toddler. The bottom third of our Christmas tree looks like it has been visited by a tiny Grinch.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Christmas, but we tend to do it fairly low-key in our family. One gift each (apart from the baby, who will of course get horribly spoiled, being the only baby in the family) and a £10 limit. It removes a lot of the unnecessary stress around shopping and wrapping, and pretending to really love the singing socks you've just been handed, like a reluctant house-elf.

One thing I have done for the last few years (excepting last year when I was on maternity leave) is sing with the choir in the carol service at Canary Wharf. I love the choir. I've been singing in it now for about five years. Even when I left the company to whom the choir technically belongs, I still returned to sing. A lovely group of people.

But this year I wondered if perhaps I should retire from carol services. To give a bit of context, I wasn't feeling at my best. Extended vomiting and colds, stretching now for the best part of six weeks meant that I was physically (and mentally) a bit drained and wobbly. The other big problem that stopped me enjoying this particular service was my ever-increasing rampant atheism.

Now, don't get me wrong - I love a good opportunity for a bit of evangelical atheism, but if I'm honest, I'm not sure a carol service is the best place for that. It's a bit like going to a synagogue and offering round bacon sandwiches. But I find it hard to switch off.

The vicar came over to speak to us, "I am sure you will all be singing like angels today," she said.

Another lady (not one from my choir, but from one of the other firms' choirs) said, "Ah, but the angels were all men, weren't they?"

I couldn't help myself. "Plus they were a little bit imaginary."

She gave me a look and continued. "They all have men's names: Michael, Raphael, Gabriel..."

"... Lucifer," I added.

She said, "There's always a heckler, isn't there?" and walked away. And actually, for once, I did feel a bit guilty. Not for taking the piss out of a grown up who believes in fairies - that's par for the course. But probably doing it just before a carol service wasn't really fair. It's a bit like the difference between not actively lying to your child about Father Christmas, and making the effort to go to a Santa's Grotto and shouting out that it's just Dave from Loughton wearing a beard.

Having said that, I suffered through the (approximately) six lessons and carols. A lifetime (no exaggeration) of this, plus a very good verbal memory means I literally know all the words of said lessons and carols off by heart. And it irritates me that so much brain space is taken up with such guff (apart from the lyrics to It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, which are actually very nicely-written).

I have no problem with the great and good of Canary Wharf being rinsed for a bit of charity cash (which is very much what the services are about - and given its demographic, I believe they do extremely well out of it), but I just wish it wasn't in the name of something so unlikely. I have never yet made it to the 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People, but it is very much on my list of things to do.

I think Christmas is absolutely a time for charity - for thinking about people in the depths of winter with no light at the end of the tunnel. I think it is a time for family. Hell, it can even be time for getting together and singing. But I would love to see that all happen without it needing to be to appease a being supposedly so great that it created the whole of earth... and yet so twattish that it needs to be endlessly praised - or else there will be dire consequences. I think we have all worked for someone like that. And I think we can all agree they are dicks. Easiest just to ignore them. Pretend they don't exist. (In this particular case - no pretence needed.)

So I may retire - not from the choir - but from the carol services. And instead put that time back into the family. At least for Christmas.

School night

With the baby being sick yet again, I did what any good parent would do, and left her with TheBloke (TM) whilst I went away for the night to see old school chums.

We've been friends since the early 1990s, and I think we've done OK. We are doctors, solicitors, accountants, project managers, and people who do vaguely officey professional things that are difficult to describe. We drank champagne. We ate nibbles. We talked about old school memories, teachers, friends. We laughed (a little bit) about some of the Annabelles we were at school with. And because we are all grown-ups now, we talked about mortgages, children (we have six and a half of the little midgets between us), interest rates... and it turned out we had three National Trust memberships within the group.

Photo courtesy of Hazel, whose camera adds chins, pounds and grey hairs

Times have changed. It's been over 20 years since we first met, and I suppose it would be a big fat lie to say that we haven't aged or changed in any way. But something weird happens when you get back together with people you've known for ages - you just don't see them as any different than they were when they were wearing school uniform (and probably laughing about Annabelles, whose catchphrase, "Are you talking about me?" would - for once - actually have held true this weekend).

We all stayed overnight. I think the main reason TheBloke (TM) was keen for me to go - despite the vomity baby - was the fact that he still believes girls' sleepovers mean that we all wear satin nighties, have pillow fights that turn (naturally) into lesbian orgies. He wanted me to take photos.

Don't tell TheBloke (TM) but this didn't actually happen, and my Primark pyjamas stayed firmly on all night. Sorry.

The next morning commenced with bacon sandwiches and a cup of tea. Pretty much a perfect weekend. And much better than TheBloke (TM)'s, which mostly involved washing vomit off various surfaces.

So yes, a perfect weekend. Until I got the stupid baby's vomiting virus (again) and spent all of last night with my head down the toilet.