It's Christmas eve, the day is still dark and I am in the kitchen, facing the back door - and this is the only view I can see for the window, it is obscured by a "light" curtain and four instruments of pleasure - well they may not do it for you, but hey, I get a lot of fun with these babies sitting on my knee. I wrote a new song yesterday on the banjo and that is the nice thing about different instruments, you write in different ways. The banjo gave me a sub-Steve Earle kind of sound, the mandolin (depending on how I play it) can be more Italian, the little guitar on the right is a travel guitar but is great for blues and slide. And indeed I am itching to play the slide now and will in a minute but the house is still asleep for it is just gone seven and there is no work or school to be done, just the turkey to be collected. The kitchen itself looks very seasonal. It is painted red for a start and that helps, and the laptop I am writing on is sitting on a red tablecloth, stitched with swirls and shapes of holly leaves and berries. The fruit bowl smells fresh and full of clementines and apples and bananas and am drinking a combined fruity confection of Green tea supplemented by another teabag containing cranberry, raspberry and elderflower - exotic, yes/no? Definitely a Christmas smell - a fruity start to the day and I like it, though I have just eaten a mince pie too - gluten free and rather tasty, except I found them in the cupboard and it was only after I had eaten that I noticed the box said, best before 30 Jan 2009 - oops - this blog might be my last. 
The picture left was the first I used in this blog, looking all studious and working. It was about 7am in the morning, for I am a morning person and we were in Turkey on holiday. I guess I look fairly respectable, but I am actually the great unwashed for it is pre-shower time and I am sitting in my boxers drinking fruit tea, as I am now, writing before the day kicks in proper, as I am now, though my top half is wrapped in a huge wool jumper. The morning is still and quiet here, there is barely a sound in my kitchen except the creaking of this Georgian house as it grumbles and stretches its aching bones to greet the day. Strange how easily you get used to the creaks and groans of a house. And this evening will be spent in someone else's kitchen because every year my neighbours to the left, to the right and across the street have drinks before during and after Christmas and no one ever gets beyond the kitchen. The only thing that changes is the jumpers -Christmas eve has last years offering, Christmas day has the new one you will never wear again because its a Christmas jumper and then Boxing day it will be the nice cashmere one - there must be a philosophy treatise on that some where, jumpers of yesterday, today and tomorrow - the aesthetics of the postmodern domestic life hmm, have a feeling i won't be publishing that one in Philosophy Quarterly. So let's do pop music instead - I heard this when I was driving in the snow the other day and I liked the freshness of it:And yesterday I received an email from Ian who is the person outside of family I have known longer than anyone. We have known each other for 50 years - which is unbelievabubble really. We met on our first day at school and that must have been in 1959 - goodness - and we played football together for Newtongrange Star, went to gigs, a school cruise to Norway on the Devonia and I wish we were sitting down with a beer now - hopefully that time will come next year - but not before I dump the mince pies I have been hording, I wonder what else is hidden in there (having a different diet to everyone else in the house means I have a different food cupboard and that does tend to mean things get overlooked - even if I do buy them myself).
