And a belated merry Xmas to you all.
Were you good boys and girls? Did Santa bring you everything you asked for? Personally I could not have wished for a better festive period, or a more action packed one to be honest. Here's why.
Presents Tense
The lead up to the big day is something that has changed significantly since I wed my darling wife, Tina, back in 2012. Before that, early December was a time of blissful inactivity, slowly but surely giving way to a rapidly rising sense of panic as I realise how many shopping days are actually left until the 25th. This panic has only ever been exacerbated by the fact that some of the needed presents had to be bought for the living enigmas that are the females of the species; that and I got my mum bath stuff the last 5 years.
Having the feminine perspective so close to hand has of course, alleviated this stress of this by about a trillion percent although I now have the added pressure of making sure I do a decent job with her gifts (Nailed it again this year, boom!)
Over-Carolling
The big difference though, has been in how busy the few weeks before the event have become. As some of you, my dearest readers, will possibly recall, Tina is a member of the Salvation Army. This means that, as well as the over-eating, over-drinking, and rampant consumerism there's a variety of church-type events to squeeze in to the season. Christmas, you see, seems to have some small religious significance amongst the true believers™. This has led to your friendly neighbourhood seated person attending a variety of meetings, nativity plays, and approximately 45 different carol concerts.
Okay that last number might be a tad exaggerated.
The fact, however, is that I've heard brass renditions of 'We wish you a merry christmas', 'O Little Town Of Bethlehem', and 'Little Donkey' more times in the last few weeks than most people squeeze into a long and healthy life time. On the whole I feel that I have borne this with a generous amount of cheerful equanimity, even though my repeated requests for 'The fairytale of New York' have, thus far, fallen on deaf ears. Having received a special gift at the Xmas day morning meeting (yes, that's Xmas day morning!) of a bag of humbugs, I think I may be in the minority on that one.
Relatively Speaking
So, you may ask, that's religion, what else has caused silly season to be so jam packed Mr Seated Perspective? Well, as you ask so nicely, there has also been the (admittedly extremely pleasant) task of visiting the relatives. Of course there's the folks to call on, and the rest off the family, who have the good taste to time their visits to my parents to coincide with ours. This way we get to see my nieces and nephews, sisters and brothers-in-law, and aunts and uuncles, alongside my parents; which is handy. As one of my nephews has his birthday on he 22nd, a pre-Crimbo drop in always goes down well, but then we also usually meet up on Boxing day too, and, in fact, that's just what we did.
That's not to forget Tina's family of course. We had Gwen, my wonderful mother-in-law (all the jokes are most definitely wrong in her case) and my equally fabby brother and sister-in-law (That's Tina's brother and his lovely wife.) for Xmas dinner. This wasn't instead of the usual turkey you understand, we just played hosts and enjoyed a cracking day of fantastic company, including an hilariously epic game of Cards Against Humanity. I cooked. No-one died.
So that leaves my amazing step-daughter, Sarah.
Long term sufferers of this blog might have gleaned that Sarah doesn't live with us full time, and the advent of A-levels coupled with a part time job asking if people want fries with that, has led to us not seeing quite as much of her as we would like as of late. As we were having trouble getting her over to see us we therefore decided that Mohammed would go to the mountain and headed off for a festive wander around Chester with her.
Chester Minute!
Chester is a lovely city, a historic city, filled with (mock) Tudor buildings, resplendent in white and black. It has an allegedly lovely cathedral, and some nice shops to moosey around in too. What it doesn't have, what is in fact shockingly absent, is any semblance of working disabled facilities.
We'll leave the cobbled streets to one side for a moment, as they bring back far too painful a memory, and instead we'll concentrate on something of perhaps a little more importance to your average wheelchair user.
To set the scene, the journey from my current base in Mirfield, West Yorkshire (birthplace of Captain Picard AND Professor X) to Chester is approximately an hour and a half, perhaps a little more if you get lost... which of course I did. Add to this that our last stop before setting off was to a local farm shop that Tina 'popped' into only to emerge, a little bedraggled, a full 40 minutes later and I'm sure you can understand why matters of a toiletry nature were starting to become a priority.
It's never great, in such circumstances, when, after having struggled up a reasonably steep ramp due to a faulty lift in the car park, the first accessible loo you come across is out of order. When the next two such facilities are equally kaput though, well then you're really up against it. Luckily the restaurant we eventually ate in did have a working loo or things could have become... Interesting.
Blowing Off Steam
Thus refreshed, relieved, and fed we set off on our moosey only to be greeted by a torrential rainstorm of the trouser soaking variety. (See here for more on that!) Luckily there was a shopping centre to dodge through, unluckily, the lift to access this was... Well you guess. It took a whole deluge dodging fifteen minutes before a well known book store granted us shelter, a hot cup of coffee, and a radiator to gently steam by.
And so that was Christmas, and that's what I did. Luckily we have Sarah for a few days either side of New Year so we get to pretty much do it all over again (Christmas 2: The Revenge!) For now I'm going to bask in the warmth of these memories, strike Chester from my list of places to visit, give serious consideration to a second serving of turkey curry and see how far the Mrs gets in her promise to watch Doctor Who.
Anyone for Stollen?
Until next time...
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