MEAL OUT: Berkeley Arms (Wymondham)

Our last meal out with Lee and Su this year (pending any last minute arrangements) and we ended on a decent one. After a somewhat ponderous journey down the most one-track road this side of Christendom (complete with 176 passing places!) we arrived at the pub and were greeted by a load of 'Country-types' clogging up the bar area with their tweed jackets and farmer shirts.

Thankfully we quickly vacated the bar and took our seats and were told there were some specials (which we weren't the slightest bit interested in) before perusing the menu. At first glance it looked a bit... but then I noticed there was sausages and mash and lamb and steak, so not bad. We didn't want a starter so we had some Hambleton bread, which was brought and 'announced' along with the butter (that's a first, never known butter require announcing before!) which was nice and took the edge off.

Rose and I both had sausage and mash, at first the gravy tasted a bit 'sweet', but once I got used to it it was okay. The sausages were very nice and the mash was extremely creamy (probably 40% cream). And then for pud Rose had orange cheesecake (okay) with blackberry sorbet (excellent), while I had sticky toffee pudding, which was nice but... I think I'm going off sticky toffee pudding as it seems a bit too sweet these days. Must be an age thing...

Pretty good all told and not bad at £40 per head.

FLECKNEY: Christmas Tree Festival (St Nicholas Church)

CONSERVA-TREE

The now traditional pre-Christmas 'Christmas Tree Festival' at St Nicholas Church. saw a mixture of incredibly creative ideas and some less interesting trees (usually made by children). My personal favourite was called 'Cartridge in a Bare Tree' while Rose voted for the 'Can Can Tree'. Neither of these is featured on Facebook, but 'Conserva-tree' was quite good as well.

We entered the raffle and also partook of the tombola where we won a reed diffuser and a plastic thing from Aldi for making pom-poms. Yay. 

MEAL OUT: The Waterfront (Market Harborough)

We decided to take the Mums out for dinner and settled on The Waterfront for a change. Service was a bit slow, but the food was excellent and four people for £80 was pretty damned good.

SHOPPING: Bicester Village

Our most successful visit to (the new and larger) Bicester village to date! Rose got a dress and a TAG Heuer wallet (for my Xmas pressie) and I got Rose a Kate Spade bag for Xmas too... in fact we spent about £400 altogether. Proper shopping.

On the way home we went to the Green Man pub on the A43, which was adequate and cheap. Which is about all you can say about it really... but we probably shouldn't have expected much from a Chef and Brewer.

SHOPPING: Kibworth Antiques

Spent a pleasant hour or so mooching around Kibworth Antiques, which carries a varied selection of stuff, some nice, some utter tat. It was only at the end of our visit we noticed the very cool Rolex wall clocks with sweeping hands. Unfortunately, at £165 I thought they were a bit steep. But very cool...

CATS: Poppy and Ming arrive!

Patrina brought the new kitties today, they went and hid under the coffee table for the first few hours but eventually came out and within a couple of days were charging around like they owned the place!

We explained to Patrina how we'd got the names the wrong way round but she didn't seem to mind. We didn't realise until today that they'd been in the shelter for nearly a year - poor poppets!

SHOPPING: Meadowhall (Sheffield)

Not one of our most productive trips to Sheffield really, although I did get try on the new TAG Heuer Monaco and the Carrera Heuer 01 Senna Special Edition. Aside from that I managed to get all my Christmas cards sorted and spent a small fortune in Hotel Chocolat...

http://tagheuerenthusiast.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/on-wrist-carrera-heuer-01-ayrton-senna.html

http://tagheuerenthusiast.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/on-wrist-monaco-quartz-watch.html

Rob's Gigs of the Year...

1. CYFERDYNE (Lancaster)
2. AESTHETIC PERFECTION (Manchester)
3. ACCESSORY (Bradford)
4. NACHTMAHR (London)
5. ASSEMBLAGE23 (Manchester)
6. NEONSOL (Manchester)
7. MESHUGGAH (Nottingham)
8. ROTERSAND (Bradford)
9. THE BIRTHDAY MASSACRE (Wolverhampton)
10. SPEAK AND SPELL (Derby)
11. THE HAUNTED (Nottingham)
12. CYFERDYNE (Sheffield)
13. WILLIAM CONTROL (Manchester)
14. TARJA (Manchester)

GIG: Nachtmahr (London)

Our third time seeing Nachtmahr, and it slotted in nicely between the epic Cardiff show in 2015 and the disappointing (and very hot) gig in Swansea last year. We only found at within the last week that the show wasn't a 'club' show (ie starting at midnight) and so we hastily made plans to go.

Lots of people in uniforms and Nachtmahr hats and it was a good show. A very late night though since we didn't get home until about 2:30am. They finally played 'Tradition' as well, which made me happy.

Support band D-K-A-G really got boring quite quickly, and proved the point that creating pounding electronic music does take talent to pull off. Compare Thomas Rainer's 'BoomBoomBoom' with their songs and the difference was night and day, but still... at least the gig ran to time and we got a seat on the train.

Quite a day!

NANNA: Pet Rescue Centre

After years of donating, following the sad demise of poor Saffy, we decided to visit Nanna to get two new cats. Mum asked to come along so we all went together on a Saturday morning. We had seen a few pairs of cats on the website and the favourites seemed to be Phobe and Millie, and Yaramas and Minic (or Aramis and Mnemic as we started to call them).

There was a photo of Ming and Poppy on the website, but I thought they were so cute they were bound to have been given a home already...

Phoebe and Millie were dreadfully shy, Aramis and Mnemic were nice but they seemed quite old (older than eight anyway), and the minute I saw Poppy and Ming I fell in love with them. Surprisingly Ming is the ginger one... which seems all wrong to us.

GIG: The Birthday Massacre (Wolverhampton)

My fourth time seeing TBM, and definitely better than the last two times. Parking was an absolute fucking nightmare and I ended up having to park in a dodgy open air car park about fifteen minutes walk away from the venue... still it all worked out okay and I arrived just in time, literally walking into the venue as they started the first song!

Chibi had definitely dialed down the heart finger nonsense and it just seemed a lot better, the last two gigs at the Digbeth Library had strange sound which made it feel like you were watching a band miming.