Reupload - December 2023 Blog

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a joyous month and are looking to the new year with excitement. 

I’m not, but I hope everyone else is. 

Leap years are always good luck. I mean, wasn’t 2020 great? And 2016, what a year! Look, our New Year’s Eve sucked. I’d come up to Birmingham to visit Francis, and the selfish bastard caught norovirus, so we spent the day in separate rooms, on our phones, reading, and napping. He’d stopped shitting his guts out by midnight, so I let him come up to the attic room to watch the fireworks. We could see all of Birmingham from there, and it was lit up beautifully, or as beautifully as Birmingham can be managed. 

The magic wore off when we went downstairs to check on his cat, to make sure she wasn’t too scared of all the fireworks, and we found she’d killed a robin and left it on the rug. She was sat next to it too, looking… proud? Happy? Well, it certainly wasn’t “ashamed”. So we spent part of the first hour of the new year cleaning up dead bird. There were feathers everywhere.

We went to sleep, and since waking up the day hasn’t been a complete disaster. We’ve just been sitting quietly, writing our blogs and drinking hot drinks. 

I’d had norovirus a week and a half prior, just a few days before Christmas, but not during Christmas itself because I’m considerate. Wouldn’t recommend it. You could’ve lay me on a swivel chair and I’d have turned into a sprinkler. Still, at least it only lasted a day or so. It put a lot of our Christmas plans into jeopardy, and I was more worried about mum, who got ill just before me. She looked so sad.

Christmas Day itself was fun. It was the first Christmas without my brother there, as he was spending the day with his girlfriend and baby. Me and mum watched Doctor Who, and loved it. The previous few days had been spent watching the specials with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and we’d forgotten how much we’d loved it. I also think Ncuti Gatwa is a fantastic doctor with great energy, and I can’t wait to see more of him. I can’t believe we have to wait til May for more Who!

Christmas dinner was a baller too. It was fairly traditional, but with a chicken instead of a turkey, and I loved it. I love homemade stuffing so much and could just eat platefuls of the stuff. I only had the one serving, though, as my stomach was still a little sensitive. 

I have mixed feelings on the Ghosts finale. I’m glad the writers decided to have an exorcism scene and see how the ghosts would react to that. I also like that they went back for Humphrey, that they made an effort to search for him and didn’t just leave him behind, despite the potential danger. It was just really touching, after five seasons of barely interacting with him.

I think, upon reflection, Alison and Mike moving out was for the best. Button House wasn’t a suitable place to raise a baby, and it was just eating away at their finances, and kids are expensive. That being said, I wish the episode had been a bit longer, so it would’ve had time to settle in, and show their goodbyes and the ghosts accepting Alison and Mike leaving. 

Nephew came round on Boxing Day with his parents. It’s so nice having a kid around and seeing them experience the magic of Christmas for the first time. It’s especially funny since Nephew, being nearly 2, can’t hide his disappointment whenever he’d unwrap a present and it was clothes. He looked disgusted.

When he first came in, he was crying because he’d had to wear shoes and socks in the car, and he wanted to play with his toes. You can see why he was unhappy at unwrapping socks. So there he was, sat in his mum’s arms, crying softly, and he spied the presents. The tears dry up, and he points at them with a curious “more”? 

So say we spoilt him is an understatement. We were all so excited about having a child around for Christmas (first grandson for my parents too), that it took him two hours to open about half the presents. Then he had to stop for lunch and a nap, and carried on opening them afterwards. Dad had also gotten him a present, which he’d never done for me and my brother. All our presents had been from both parents, with mum generally choosing them. This year, however, dad ordered a secret present and wouldn't tell anyone what it was. When the big day came, it turned out to be a tractor and drill. You could use the drill to take parts of the tractor off, which Nephew was horrified with at first. Here he was with a new tractor, and suddenly Grandad was breaking it! He got used to it, though, and liked playing with the drill.

Nephew was also a big fan of his advent calender. He’d often drag us over to it and say-sign “more”, which usually worked with his grandad. He was so sad when he ran out of chocolate.

The day before I got norovirus, I found a new pub to visit. It was so cosy and bookish. I'd have gone back before, but I was recovering from The Shittening.

I’ll skip the “What I Read” section, for now. I’m writing a Year in Review of the books I read, so I want to avoid repetition. I’ve also talked about everything I’ve watched this month now, which wasn’t a lot, due to all the reading I had to do. I read 16 books, and because of that, this month felt like it went on forever.