Skip to main content

Venture into an Advent adventure

Image
By
Missing you...

Disaster – we forgot to buy an advent calendar.

No teensy, hard to get at, unidentifiable shaped chocolate treats hidden behind cardboard doors and impenetrable foil for me this year.

Still, there’s plenty of time left to consume my own body-weight in mince pies, cheese and pigs in blankets before the inevitable guilt (and medically necessary dieting) kicks in as 2019 shows up excitedly just when I’ve started getting used to 2018.

So, instead of wasting a shed-load of packaging to get at the equivalent of a very small chocolate bar, here are my environmentally-friendly Adventness Delights for you – a treat for every remaining day as we count down to the online sales. (And Christmas.)

18: Jona Lewie successfully Stops The Cavalry.

17: You win £50.

16: The kids are well-behaved.

15: The algorithm that shoves ads into your social media timeline fails for the day.

14: Unlimited Chocolate Hob-Nobs.

13: Calorie-free cheese that still tastes fantastic hits the shops.

12: There’s nothing on the news about Brexit for 24 hours.

11: The work Christmas party is actually quite nice, nobody gets stupidly drunk (or drunkenly stupid), and you aren’t forced to dance.

10: No hangover!

9: Donald Trump says sorry. For everything. (Might need to allow a couple of days for this one, thinking about it.)

8: When you go for another chocolate from the selection box, you always get the nice one you like. Get bent, toffee penny thing.

7: For the first time in ages, you realise you haven’t got anything you need to be doing, and get to just put your feet up for a bit.

6: No-one attempts to try and find badness in old Christmas songs written decades ago.

5: We finally agree on whether “Die Hard” is a Christmas Movie or not.

4: Doctor Who gets moved back to Christmas Day.

3: All episodes of Mrs Brown’s Boys mysteriously vanish.

2: No one famous that you like a lot and associate with happy times in days gone by pops their clogs and reminds you of your own mortality.

1: You get to spend Christmas Day exactly how you want it, with the people you want to spend it with, wearing what you want and watching what you want on TV.

I suppose I could still buy a regular Advent calendar and play catch-up. Or 24 Wispa bars, write numbers on them and tape them to the fridge. I love Christmas.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 7th of December 2018. The version used on their website used the opening line (without a dash) as the title, starting the piece itself with the second paragraph.

 No sign of the print edition yet, but it does now appear to be showing up again. Hurrah!

 One line that I replaced before submitting was (surprise!) about Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes not winning everything in F1 next year. Didn't quite fit, and perhaps a bit niche, so it was left out in favour of something else.

(CD A-Z: Still that monster Freddie Mercury box set, and the final interviews disc. Strange, hearing Fred talking in 1985 now...)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Faking it for real

By
As Donald “I’m really great, everybody says so” Trump is so fond of pointing out, there is a lot of fake news around nowadays. Honest. Your friends at Facebook think so too, and have recently been publishing their top tips for spotting false news – by placing them as ads in newspapers. Considering they came in for considerable criticism themselves, that’s like shouting “Squirrel!” and pointing at a tree whilst you hastily kick away the prize begonias you just trampled. To help you make sense of this (and because I’m a caring person), I thought I’d run you through their suggestions and help to explain them for you. I know. I’m lovely. 1. Be sceptical of headlines READING THIS ARTICLE WILL IMPROVE YOUR SEX LIFE!!! And explain that catchy headlines, or stuff all in capitals might be a bit iffy. 2. Look closely at the URL You can find out more about this at www.wowyouregullible.com if you want to understand how phony web addresses are a sure sign of dodgyness. 3. Investigate...
Post a Comment
Read more

Going Underground

By
The US presidential election and Brexit must have made me more nervous than I’d realised. It seems I’ve created an underground bunker without realising I was doing it. Still – we’ve all done that at some point, right? No? Ah... In that case, the fact that I have inadvertently turned my cellar into a rudimentary survival shelter, just in case it all kicks off, demonstrates a severe case of bunker mentality. Fretting about Donald and his wall, and Hillary and her emails, clearly made me more paranoid that I thought about the possibility of WW3 kicking off. Whilst attempting to find a specific size of imperial washer the other day (turns out I’d mis-filed it in the nut cabinet – Tsk!) I was struck by what a lot of jam and chutney we have in the cellar. And I do mean a LOT. There are boxes of boiled-up sugar and fruit and more boxes of boiled up vinegar and fruit. We’re still only part way through 2015’s output too. Then there’s the plastic containers holding pasta in various for...
Post a Comment
Read more

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

By
If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...
Post a Comment
Read more