shewhomust | It's beginning to feel a lot like ...

On Thursday we set off for our pre-Christmas visit to London. As ever, Christmas seems to have arrived before we are ready for it; and as ever, this is partly true. Certainly the calendar has reached the point where the Bears must decide whether, in order to hold the Carol Evening on a Sunday, it must fall either closer to Christmas than is reasonable, or earlier, and have opted for the latter. I think that's a good choice, but yes, definitely not ready.

We did Christmas shopping at the weekend. Not only did we go to the monthly Farmers' Market, we also attended the Christmas Fair on Palace Green. At the former we may have over-shopped for vegetables, because the vegetables are so good there; at the latter we picked up a few small gifts, but were disappointed in the hunt for cards. The local hospice had cards, and we bought the only remaining pack of the design we liked, and there were artists selling single cards, but that's ridiculous... On the way home from the Farmers' Market, we made an inspired detour to the Garden Centre, where we again cleaned them out of the design we liked (three more packs). This enabled us to send off all the overseas cards. Today

durham_rambler went to the Oxfam shop alone, and brought home a selection of cards, none of which I hate but none of which I love - and we have spent more of today that I anticipated writing cards.

Yesterday evening we zoomed in to Jim Causley and Miranda Sykes' Midwinter concert, which was pleasantly seasonal. My favourite thing was their 'medieval mashup', but there was also an intriguing combination of Sydney Carter's Song of Truth with fragments of Down in Yon Forest (which is always one of my highlights at the Carol Evening).

Meanwhile,

durham_rambler is out being festive - at an annual Parish event, to which I declined to accompany him. I have plenty to do here, thanks: including writing this, and making pizza for a late supper (you could regard it as gratuitous cooking, or you could call it appeasing the sourdough starter, which I will now freeze to await our return). More of a problem is that tonight's event has caused another meeting to be rescheduled to tomorrow, which really is inconvenient.

Oh, well. Onward!