It was a quiet weekend in our house; writing, pottering around on off jobs, and then, Neil doing a Sunday lunch, which was perfect as always, followed by a couple of films on TV. There was some writing in there somewhere, and some Christmas sorting with a few presents wrapped, and the tree up. I’ll show you a photo one day soon, it’s hilarious.
The village Christmas lights are up along the main lane, at least up to the old pharmacy. I’m not sure if they are going to go any further, but the last time I saw them, that’s as far as they’d gone, and they looked great. I saw them on our way to Scene for supper on Friday (to welcome the traveller home). I know it’s not exactly Blackpool, for which we’re all mightily grateful, but it’s cheery.
Talking of Blackpool, ‘Noted for fresh air and fun’, if you remember your Stanely Holloway monologues (The Lion and Albert). We went there years ago, in early December, to see the Christmas lights, which we did. We also saw young men being carried drunk into pubs at nine in the morning, and the ‘girls’ over from Liverpool who entertained us as much as we entertained them. We did the Pleasure Beach (‘The Big One’ was the most recent ride at the time), saw the cabaret show, rode in a landau, and stayed in probably the seediest B&B imaginable. Oh, and the ‘direct’ train home took something like four days, crawling through England’s green and pleasant hills via all manner of towns and villages I’d never heard of and no one got off at, and delivered us back to Brighton… eventually.
Well, there’s none of that going on here. The train is packed away for winter, but the lights are out and up. Any of our beeches is a pleasure beach, and luckily, we have ‘no wrecks and nobody drownded,’ but ‘plenty to laugh at’, as Mr Holloway said in his recital. Just not the Christmas lights, because they’ve only appeared over the last few years and we don’t want to scare them away.
