Rescued by Rennies

Greetings from the no man’s land of extra pounds, empty Quality Street wrappers and cheese and biscuits. For those like me, lucky enough to be off for the duration, these are the lost days and you are lucky (or unlucky) that I have remembered that today is Sunday.

Our 2020 style festivities were as lovely as they could be in the circumstances. We didn’t hug, we stayed as far away as possible from each other and the day was shorter than usual. Louise’s Mum was wrapped up and put next to a radiator to combat the breeze from the open window and the switch to a buffet, rather than a “sat down really close to each other” meal was great. Our fridge is still bulging with the leftovers. I think I should be able to stop onboarding Rennies by early March.

As the older generation left us to get “seckled” for Call The Midwife etc, those left ended the night with a disturbing game of Cards Against Humanity and a decent amount of alcohol.

Freddie of course had the time of his life, opening presents for about eight hours solid.

He still has a number of unwrapped presents boxed and pristine here which will need to be opened and played with whenever he can return. He was a little superstar all day as he always is (yes I am biased) and it was just lovely to spend that time with him.

Louise was working on Boxing Day so my day involved making Eggs Benedict for those not working, (it’s one of our little Christmas traditions) and a little bit of tidying. Our house was unrecognisable, buried under the chaos of the day before, so there was a little bit of reconstruction, but not too much as the exertions of the day before had taken its toll on my age ravaged body. I had a little play of one of my new PS4 games, which was 90% waiting for stuff to download and 10% playing.

So the last Christmas day (barring disasters) in our current house was a nice one, but I think it’s fair to say that we are all looking forward to all those to come in our new one. It is a bit bigger and more able to host what can hopefully be larger groups, with no restrictions in years to come.

A number of my gifts were new house related. Louise got me a lovely map of WDW to hang in what will be my office, along with a very good quality pair of proper Wellies as we are of course becoming landed gentry with a little chunk of land out the back of the new house. They will be essential for the walking of the dogs on it. Louise also put a huge amount of time and effort into finding an exact replica of Ryan the Rucksack. As the original is well over twenty years old then that is very impressive. We’ll now have two “Ryans” to travel with us. As if the OG is going to be retired!!

In the same vein, I got Louise a picture/painting she had admired in a shop we ordered our new couch from a few weeks ago. It will look lovely wherever Louise tells me to hang it in the new place.

One of Emily’s gifts was a large mirror for her new bedroom and Rebecca and Tom’s main gift was also new house-related, with us contributing to some improvements they want to make as soon as they move into their new place. It’s fair to say that we are all focussed on these new beginnings coming early in 2021.

The focus for me over the next week is one of recharging and relaxing if I can. I think there will need to be a start made to the packing up of stuff and with that in mind, we have been collecting boxes for weeks now. Many of those boxes have come from us trying one of these meal delivery services recently. We had fallen into the trap of eating the same meals every week, and as I got a healthy discount for a trial period via work, we gave it a go. So we’ve had some nice meals in recent weeks, which has been a lovely change and each cardboard box will be ideal for moving. They keep pestering me to recruit other folks to their service so if you were thinking about it you can get £20 off using my special code thing. Believe me, this is in no way sponsored. No bugger gives a toss about my blog enough to be giving me paid promotions.

I hope your Christmas was as good as it could be. I will improve it a little by putting a stop to this rambling drivel now. My brain is semi-disengaged and this post is proving that. By the time we meet again, 2020 will be behind us. I still think we have some tough times to endure in the early parts of the new year. I don’t think New Year’s Eve will be any form of an immediate watershed between bad and good (are they ever?) but let’s keep our fingers crossed that as we move into Spring and Summer, 2021 gives us back some form of normality.

Please accept best wishes for the new year from myself, Louise, Emily, Rebecca, Tom and Freddie and if there is one thing to cling to it is that the atrocity that is Mrs Brown’s Boys is now behind us. The only way is up.

Till the next time……