Bouquet of Flowers

 

Fleckney Christmas Tree Festival 2025

Time once again for our annual pilgrimage to the St Nicholas Church in Fleckney for the Christmas Tree Festival (which as always, takes place in the middle of November for some reason). 

Well it was much the same as other years, although the creativity we've seen in previous years was a bit thin on the ground. I could have done without the nausea inducing 'Diversitree', but this is the world we live in these days isn't it? Ho hum. 

We voted for the 'Cupcake Tree (No19)' and the 'Knitted Tree (No6)', they weren't the actual names of them but we gave the programme back so I can't help you there.

No doubt either the Scouts or the pre-schoolers Trees won, because they usually do (fix!), if so I hope it was the pre-schoolers because the Scouts' one was a bit rubbish honestly.

We bought five raffle tickets, but as we haven't heard anything I guess we haven't won. Mind you I think my phone's been off all day so maybe we have, I better check!

We also headed out the back and bought a few Christmas decoration, including a knitted penguin that has a Terry's Chocolate Orange inside. 

Finally we had a few goes at the Tombala, in fact we had sixteen goes, and we won absolutely nothing. But I did pull out ticket number '666' which was worth it's weight in comedy gold.  

GIG: Combichrist (Nuneaton)

 

A couple of years ago we caught an 'old school electro' set from Combichrist at the Rescue Rooms in Nottingham. At the time we didn't really appreciate that it would just be Andy plus some random 'DJ' guy behind him... and this combined with a quite full venue and an unfamiliar setlist meant it was a little bit disappointing. Though perhaps not as disappointing as the full set we saw in Birmingham earlier this year, where the sound was shite!

The set list was broadly the same as last time, albeit in a different order but the sound was great here, it was the lighting that was a bit poor; perhaps it was by design, but with the only lights at the back of the stage we only saw Andy in silhouette most of the time. And, forewarned, we had been able to listen to the songs we were expecting a bit more so at least they were a bit more familiar.

Can't help thinking the setlist would be better if it featured more of their 'hits', but I suppose this is meant to appeal to the hardcore industrial fan, rather than casual Combichrist fans. If Slayer did something similar I would be all for it, so I understand.

Despite the heavy rain we managed to get there and back without any major problems, just one massive puddle on the A5 really.

MEAL OUT: The Grey Goose (Gilmorton)

Our second visit to the Grey Goose in the space of a month, and this time we decided to forego the (ludicrously expensive) fillet steak in favour of burgers and fish/chips. I switched the fries for chunky chips and it was bloody delicious. Rose had treacle tart for pudding and I had Biscoff cheesecake (of course), I was so full after that I could barely breathe! 

SHOPPING: MK Centre + Escape Room (Milton Keynes)

 

Another trip to Milton Keynes, this time the main purpose being to finalise as much Christmas shopping as possible. All in all, we did pretty well, and the time flew by. When we booked the Escape Room for 3:30pm I wondered what we were going to do to fill the time, but in actual fact there was barely a wasted moment. Due to the rain we decided to park in the multistorey carpark and that was quite good as I ended up going back to the car several times to drop off shopping. 

I visited the TH boutique and tried on the two new Senna watches, which were both quite cool and then we scooted off to the escape room which was just a couple of minutes drive away.

We previously visited Escape Hunt earlier in the year, to do the 'Aladdin & The Magic Vault' room which was brilliant, so we had high expectations (especially given the £70 ticket price). I don't think it was as good as that room and it didn't help that Rose smacked her head really hard on a badly designed prop. Also it was a little frustrating at times that things didn't always work even if you had them 'right'. We wasted quite a lot of time moving cups around a table only for it to unlock the next stage despite the fact that we had it right the first time. But then this is quite often a 'feature' of escape rooms where things need to sit 'just right' or where mechanisms get worn... 

We did manage to escape, just, though as ever some of it just seemed to 'happen' and we're not quite sure what we did to make it so. Again though, this isn't exactly unusual with escape rooms and it was  an enjoyable way to spend an hour.