The Posh Doorman Strikes Again...

Despite embarrassing myself, horribly, at last year's office Christmas party at the very grand Blenheim Palace - which you can read all about over here - I was allowed back again this year.

Photo source

Photo source

Happy Christmas!

Wishing everyone a very happy festive season... may your glass always be full, your meat tender, potatoes crisp, brussel sprouts absent, and your loved ones near!

Thank you to all my fabulous readers for your support and friendship this past year….


Nat xx

Blog Posts Of Christmases Past

It's almost Christmas already and I've not posted anything even vaguely festive this year.... apart from sharing that recipe for my now infamous booze-addled Christmas cake back in November. Perhaps I peaked too soon? With fortnightly rum top-ups, the cake is quite possibly a sitting fire hazard by now... perhaps best not to serve it with the flaming brandy pudding!

Then I suppose there was the rather silly behaviour at my office Christmas party this year ... you'd think I would know a lot better, especially since I wrote a whole post about the folly of those overindulging in alcoholic beverages in front of their work colleagues, round about this time last year....10 Reasons Not To Get Drunk At Your Office Christmas Party! How the mighty how fallen?! If there's one thing I hate, it's a hypocrite....

Another thing I detest? Satan's little green balls! They're everywhere at the moment, rather like some recurring, annoying little Christmas jingle. This witty (or perhaps rather shitty!) little ditty first appeared way back in 2009 on this somewhat odious (!) post here.....

Nat's Ode To Brussels Sprouts

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...

I loathe to spy thee lying on my plate

All small and green and round

I detest thee, soggy vegetable

I abhor thy sulphur scent

Boiled or roasted, steamed or fried

I hate thee for thou bitter taste

It makes me gag and twist my face

And later I hate thee even more

When two hours on, the air turns poor!

And sprouts are not the only things I hate about Christmas. Indeed, I made a whole list last year... only 5 Things I Hate About Christmas? Huh! I reckon my list grows yearly, as I become more crotchety and bah humbugish in my dotage. Mostly, I'm just fed up with the growing commercialisation of it all... the fact that it all seems to be less about spending time with your loved ones, and more about how much loot you can get! Mind you, there was a time when getting the latest "Baby Doll In A Rocking Cradle" was a very big thing for me...

Yes, back in the "olden days" when Christmas for me fell in the middle of a hot Southern hemisphere summer holiday... sun, sand and surf. A barbeque and the beach.... now I dream about a white Christmas, coz it looks pretty... for a while...but I really just can't be bothered with all that inevitable slush, ice and shovelling snow! Chances of snow are in fact very slim in the UK this Christmas, with temperatures set to soar to a tropical 11C later this week... Global Warming anyone?

Can you now see what I've managed to do here? Cobble together a whole post, pretty much from the posts of Christmases past. Needs must when a serious lack of inspiration and a heavy dosage of laziness sets in...and all that egg nog. Nothing wrong with a bit of recycling - the BBC do this all the time.... rerun the same old programmes at Christmas, year in, year out, with just the odd sprinkling of something new to trick viewers into thinking they're getting value for their licence fees.


So, I may not have wowed you all with my original seasonal prose today, but I'll leave you with a shot of my "fabulously festive" Christmas tree at least....

Happy Christmas everyone!

Five Things I Hate About Christmas

Warning! Bah humbug theme throughout this post, which may not be suitable reading for those who absolutely love Christmas and everything about it...



1. Christmas shopping

It’s not the gift buying per se that I object to (my name’s not Ebenezer Scrooge, although I did once live in Ebenezer Road) but it’s the marauding masses with their screaming, sulking brats little darlings in tow that can make shopping such an awful experience. Long queues at the checkout, unhelpful shop staff and items that I want always out of stock on the shop floor, can add up to a very bad day out. Therefore, in the interests of personal sanity, this year I’ve done my entire Christmas shop online...I think I may be developing a bit of an obsession for internet shopping in fact... but I just love it! Clickety click....ding dong.... “Just sign here”....what a pleasure! Only problem is, half the jolly country has decided that this is the way forward, and, coupled with the snow disruption, there’s apparently a back log of over 4 million parcels to deliver. I’m now getting just a tad worried that not everything is going to arrive in time...



2. Brussels sprouts

I’ve already ranted on about my hatred of Satan’s green balls on here ... and you’re right, no one is actually forcing me to buy them, let alone eat them. They do, however, have a nasty habit of cropping up, completely uninvited, on my plate at Christmas parties. Apparently, they’re festive fare....fair, my foot! Just the sight of them, let alone their stench, is enough to make me retch!

 

3. Christmas pudding

Again, consumption of this stodgy ball of fruity, alcoholic fat is (thankfully!) not compulsory, and passing on the dessert course is one way to cut the calorific load of the Christmas day feast. I just don’t understand why anyone would pay vast sums of money for one such pudding, but that’s exactly what has been going on here in the UK this year. Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal (famous for serving up such culinary delights as snail porridge, and bacon and egg ice-cream at his Three Michelin-starred restaurant, ‘The Fat Duck’) designed The Hidden Orange pudding, which has a whole candied Valencia orange at its centre, and is reputedly The Must-Have Christmas Pudding of The Century. The puds went on sale in Waitrose for £13.99 and were almost all sold out in a week, then started appearing on eBay, selling to the highest bidders for up to £129! The proof of that pudding will be in the eating, me thinks, but just don’t choke on that candied peel or it won’t be such a Merry Citrus....

4. Annoying fragrance ads

Until we get TV that emits a scent (possibly a good idea for cookery shows, not such a great one for workout programmes, or documentaries on sewage works), ad agencies are always going to struggle to sell perfume, the product, opting to rather promote the ‘lifestyle’ that apparently comes with it. And judging from the ads on TV at the moment, spraying yourself with perfume will immediately transform you into a sullen-looking, hollow-cheeked girl who dances bizarrely around rooms, or else drapes herself uncomfortably over a sofa, and awaits the entrance of some equally sullen-looking, rather effeminate bloke. Why do all perfume ads have to end with some random French words spoken in a breathy, exaggerated whisper?



5. Writing Christmas Cards

Spending as much time as I do on a keyboard, I’m rapidly losing the power to write anything by hand...how on earth did I ever get through university lectures taking notes, and write 4-hour exams? These days, just signing a couple of Christmas cards is enough to send my hand into arthritic spasms... forget putting little personal messages in each card, the recipients are lucky to get a spidery, scrawled “Love Nat”... maybe just an ‘N’ by the time I get to the end of the pile of dozens of cards I somehow feel obliged to send out each year. Then there’s the inevitable hour-long queue in the post office to contend with, followed by the heart palpitations that accompany the realisation of just how much it’s going to cost to send those cardboard creations across the globe...next year I’m doing e-cards!

 

So, is there anything you hate about Christmas....or do you just love, love, love it all?

10 Reasons Not To Get Drunk At Your Office Christmas Party

1. You may end up telling your...er...uptight (and pregnant for the second time round) manager: “I did worry about you having a baby...you and your husband were both already so highly strung, I thought becoming parents would send you over the edge!”
2. You could find yourself throwing your arms around the boss at the end of the evening, sobbing “You are the best boss I’ve ever had!”...not quite the great compliment it may seem, when everyone knows you’ve only worked for two companies in your life.
3. You might go around telling everyone that So-and-so (who fortunately is not actually at the office party this year) is "really quite useless and it’s a wonder she has not been fired by now".

4. You may get so drunk already at the pre-dinner drinks that you get a serious case of the munchies, and find yourself ordering a plate of nachos....nachos that get added to the total bar bill (£4,500), incurring a 10% service charge on the whole bill and meaning that those nachos cost your boss an extra £450!
5. You could still be so drunk from those pre-dinner drinks (the lousy nachos did nothing to soak up the alcohol) that you wind up falling asleep at the dinner table with your fork mid air, then later slump face first into your food.
6. You may have sober colleagues with cameras at hand to record you falling face first into your food...colleagues who print copies of those photos and distribute them around the whole office the following day.

7. You might convince yourself that you are The Dancing Queen (or Karaoke King) and subject your colleagues to appalling entertainment all night... colleagues who once again have those cameras to hand, and have also now befriended you on Facebook.
8. You may not notice you're suffering a wardrobe malfunction and be revealing far more of yourself to your colleagues than is quite frankly decent.

9. You could fall out of the party venue, pirouette helplessly on your 9 inch heels, then stumble into the arms of a passing stranger, exclaiming “That darn pavement is very dangerous!” (yes, deceptively flat, isn’t it?)
10. You may well suffer short-term memory loss and never know how on earth you got from London’s Soho district to Charing Cross station one mile away... but next thing you know you are on a train that is miraculously headed homewards (and at least you have the sense to call your husband and ask him to phone you when you're close to your home station, thus ensuring  you are awake to get off that train and don't end up riding to the end of the line)

These are lessons I’ve learnt over the past few years....from watching the drunken debauchery of my colleagues, I hasten to add....OK, OK, I may be guilty of that last one but that was back in the bad old days when I worked for the delightful swearing, shouting obnoxious boss and we were all determined to drink his inflated bank balance dry. Since then, though, I limit my intake to just enough to be sociable, but sober enough to watch the antics unfolding all around me.

How about you...did you think alcohol and office Christmas parties are a good combination?



Dear Santa

Yeah, it’s me...that little girl who cried her eyes out on Christmas morning 1979 when the “Baby Doll In A Rocking Cradle” turned out to be just a crappy cradle. Somebody (no names mentioned) didn’t bother to check the box for its full contents. Do you have any idea what type of elaborate yarn my parents had to spin by me to explain the absence of Baby? Apparently Baby was not well and had to stay in the Babies’ Hospital until after Christmas....conveniently around about the time the shops reopened. When Baby did finally come home, she’d grown blonde hair. I’d specifically requested a brunette Baby, coz, even at the age of 5, I was sick of all the blondes having all the fun.

That was when I first started wondering about you, Santa....you were supposed to be perfect and yet how could you make such a fundamental error? Attention to detail and all that, you know! Most unprofessional! And another thing that bugged me about you as a child was if there’s only one of you and you lived in the North Pole...who were all those Santa-lookalikes, one in every department store? Remember, this was long before they cloned Dolly. More awkward questions for my parents...apparently those other Santas were just your helpers, after all the North Pole is a long way from tropical Africa. They couldn’t quite explain why you brought the rich kids so many more cool toys though...

Anyway, not to dwell on the past, bygones are bye byegones and all that....I’m writing to you this year, Santa, with just one request. It’s quite a Biggie, but it’s not just for me. Here goes...

Could you please get rid of cancer....like eradicate it! It’s really messed up the past year and nearly took my dad away from me twice. Luckily he’s a great fighter and he’s with us for Christmas, coz it was a bit touch and go earlier this year. But now cancer’s picking fights with a lot of my friends’ families too. I know you don’t tolerate bullies and I’d say there’s no bigger bully than the Big C.

And if you possibly have a bit of space in that great sleigh of yours, any chance you could hustle up a pair of witty, intelligent, good-looking guys to fall in love with a couple of equally fabulous but strangely single ladies that I know?

Thanks, Santa!

Have a very merry Christmas
Nat
.....




Happy Christmas to all those who celebrate it and Happy Days Off to those who don't. Hope you get to do many fantastic things...

I'll be back posting more random drivel in 2010, provided I don't loose my fingers in a freak frostbite accident in Norway or get eaten by an Abominable Snowman.

Always look on the bright side of life....

The Seventh Deadly Sin

SLOTH!

It's been a bad week on the Getting Fit For Norway front.... a walk on Sunday post the Christmas party binge really doesn't even count and I'd be exaggerating if I claimed I've done half an hour in total on the bike.

I'm not looking for excuses for my complete lack of self discipline...well, actually, sod it!...I am...

1. Having a lingering, hacking cough that's been keeping anyone within a 5 mile radius awake at night has not been condusive to me hauling my (sizeable) lazy ass out of my warm bed in the morning to face the arctic blasts outside (OK, it's about 5C at the moment but its dropping daily).
2.  A bit of extra padding will be handy for keeping me warm in the subzero Nordic temperatures and the fatter the ass the softer the fall onto it....and I'm sure I'll be spending quite a bit of time on my rump in the snow.
3. Sloths are actually cute creatures...

'Tis The Season To Get Fit

OK, I really need to up my fitness level with immediate effect. One month today we fly to Norway for a week of snow-related activities...we’ll be snow-shoeing most days, but there’s the chance to try cross-country skiing (at which I’m fairly confident I’ll be pathetically rubbish) and (most excitingly!) dog sledding. There’s even the very slim chance we may see the Northern Lights.

I’m not the most athletic of persons, but I do a fair bit of walking most days and have been on some quite hectic hikes in recent years (most notably the Alpine treks with the sadistic Swedish guide back in 2007 described here). I accidentally discovered snow-shoeing when the skiing part of the Christmas 2003 holiday with J and M in the French Alps didn’t really go that well for me. Might have been something to with having to be rescued off a mountain...in a blizzard...with suspected concussion...on the first day we actually hit the slopes.

Never one to do things in half measures, I was pretending to ski when I fell on the piste, whacking my head rather hard. I’d already fallen over a dozen times...even once forwards onto my face, which is apparently almost impossible to do on skis, but I did it! This was a particularly hard thwack on the back of my head, though, and, as I lay on the frozen ground, dazed and wondering which way was up or down, it started snowing very hard. That was it! I completely lost my nerve and could not face the trip back down to the chalet on my own steam. The ski lifts were now closed due to the inclement weather and everyone was hurrying to get off the slopes. We were going to have to get help or things could get scary....so experienced skier J shot off down the mountain, and soon came back with Rescue Man and his orange ski stretcher. He asked me “Do you have travel insurance?” [stupid question for a paranoid, pessimistic planner!] “Bon! Because this is the most expensive taxi ride you’ll ever take!” And at 300 euros for a few hundred metres, I should hope it was!

Rescue Man: Just lie down here

Me: You gotta be shittin' me!

To the great amusement of B, J and M (and to my mortification) I was strapped and tightly bound, like an Egyptian mummy, into the stretcher, and then dragged down the slope at high speed, behind Winter Olympics Downhill Skiing Champion aka Rescue Man. If I didn’t have concussion before that ride, I definitely had it afterwards, as my head hit every stone and tree root hidden under the snow on the way down. What was worse, the vibrations from our rapid descent caused my ski goggles to work their way up my face and the frame dug into my eye sockets....but with my arms tied to my chest, there was nothing I could do. The ski stretcher came to an abrupt halt in trendy Courchevel resort, where the Dior ski suits mingle with Prada. Everyone stopped and stared....orange stretchers usually meant broken limbs. I staggered to my feet. I was in a right state by now.... shaking from adrenaline, only partially sighted from the eye gouging of the goggles and frozen to the core, with icicles forming in my hair.

Rescue Man took me into the first aid office and proceeded to quiz me (in French) about the school my father attended and how many cats my great aunt Doris had...I later worked out he was checking me for memory loss. Luckily J was with me and she’s fluent in French (and Spanish) so she could interpret. I’d forgotten how to speak English, never mind any French I’d acquired at school. By now I was rapidly defrosting in the heat of the office, leaving a pool of water on the floor. I had to complete a form...wish I’d made a copy of it as a souvenir before I sent it to my insurers as it was filled out in the shaky, spidery writing of an octogenarian, with the watermarks of a dozen drops that dripped from my hair and onto the page.

I decided there and then that downhill skiing was not my bag, and that I would have to find some other winter activity to fill my week. And thus I discovered snow-shoeing...what a pleasure! Forget the rat run of the ski slopes.....snow-shoeing is the civilised way to enjoy snow. Breaking trails through virgin snow, trekking silently over crisp fields and through fairytale forests, pausing to sip wine and nibble cheese provided by the snow-shoe guide, while surrounded by absolute calm and breathtaking scenery. Best part: you can go downhill on your butt when faced with a hairy descent....

A slightly undignified descent!

I reckon you need to learn to ski when you’re young and fearless and have a flexible body, say around 7 or 8.....not the wrong side of 30 when the sense of mortality has kicked in and when hurtling downhill on a pair of skis not much wider than a ruler does not seem like a particularly sensible way to travel. Looking back now, I realise skiing is a lot more dangerous than I’d thought and I was crazy to be anywhere but on the nursery slopes until I’d had many more lessons. Every year, people are seriously injured when skiing (I personally know 3 people who have had long-term hospital stays and been off work for months after a slip on the slopes). Tragically, earlier this year, Natasha Richardson died following a head injury sustained when she fell during a skiing lesson in Canada.

But on that sad note, it’s time to whip my cold, lethargic butt into shape....dust off the exercise bike and do daily squats.

I’ll let you know how it goes...