…is the kind of town where not only do people skateboard down the steps at Marks and Spencer, but also the kind of town where they don’t fully remember doing it, the kind of town where they hurt themselves by not doing it properly and the kind of town where they advertise their bumps and bruises in the local paper.

This Christmas has been the most sociable in years. It’s also been something of a baptism of fire. I moved into the house just two weeks ago, yet we’ve already had three people staying for a week and, with Rich’s help, cooked full sit-down meals for them all three times a day every day.

First to arrive was Dad, last Sunday. We picked him up from Stansted after a particularly uncomfortable trip around Sainsbury’s, which had turned into some kind of battlezone. Trench warfare had broken out around the vegetables, the meat isles were being stripped bare and less bolshy shoppers were being knocked sideways by old women with overflowing trolleys.

Anyhow, we set him up in the second bedroom and spent the next couple of days finishing off the Christmas cooking, walking into town and fixing the bikes. He’s just bought a new place in town so we walked by that a couple of times to take a look, but as he’s not yet got hold of the keys we couldn’t go inside for a proper look. That’ll have to wait until the middle of next month.

We spent Christmas day at mum’s, along with Sal, Dan and Will, who all had heavy colds which it looks like we may now have too. With Viv and Tony there too it made for a very full house, but also fun games as we split into teams in the evening and avoided the abysmal revival of To The Manor Born. Dreadful. Inexcusably bad. It’s not surprising the TV guide said that preview DVDs had not been made available in advance. It is surprising (and very disappointing) that they still gave it four stars. It didn’t warrant even one.

Boxing Day, Rich’s mum and Bart arrived, and we played host at home. We did punchnip soup, half a Christmas roast and chocolate brownies for lunch, and a buffet for dinner, and in between went for walks and played games and had fun.

The days since then have gone by in a blur. Much of them have been spent opening bottles (as the recycling box will shamefully confirm), cooking toast in the new Dualit (yummy) and eating more than we need, with tuna lasagne, butternut squash pie and quiches somewhere in the mix.

Now we’re heading for New Year and it looks like being a quiet one. We both need it. Oven-baked camembert and champagne in front of the fire with Oscar will likely be the order of the day as we see the old year out and welcome the new one in.

Home-grown sprouts

Sprouts are the king of all veg, and if they’re associated with any time of year it’s Christmas. So we headed out into the garden to harvest the first of our crop this week, and served them up for lunch yesterday. They tasted fantastic.

Really full of flavour, and cooked to perfection after telly advice that the whole idea of cutting a cross into the bottom of each one was nothing more than an old wives’ tale that would lead to soggy veg and disappointment.

Nice though they were, though, I don’t know that we’ll be growing any more next year. Our plants take up at least a quarter of the plot, and we’ve already eaten a third of them. A quick browse through Sainsbury’s online shows that they would have cost us about £3 to buy in the shops, proving them to be perhaps our least valuable crop of the lot save, perhaps, the squash, which never matured.

That said, I do have some seeds for purple Brussels that I’m tempted to try in moderation. They would certainly look good on the plate, so perhaps a couple of plants may yet make their way into a border somewhere around the garden’s edge.

Oscar in his new favourite sleeping position

I think we’ve arrived – me and the cat. He’s taken up residence on the back of the settee, where he can either sleep or keep an eye on the comings and goings.

And I’m getting misaddressed mail sent my way by the neighbours. Dad managed to post my Christmas card to a house 50 doors up, to an address I don’t know, and yet it was still re-addressed and sent down my way, although only after first being opened.

I’m pretty much unpacked and sorted out, I think, but I’m losing things as quickly as I can unbox them, which probably means my sorting system needs some …er… sorting.

At the same time I’m finding out all sorts of new things, like just how cold the outhouse gets. I’ve got a thermometer out there right now and it’s showing 4 degrees. That’s not entirely bad: it’s like a great big fridge, so you can leave milk out there and keep it fresh. Same for the veg.

The only place I’ve not had time to go yet is in the back garden, apart from in passing as I have to go in and out of the house by way of the back door to stop the cat escaping. I desperately need to harvest some sprouts (it’s Christmas, after all), dig up some carrots and turn out another batch of potatoes. I hope that’ll happen tomorrow.

Apart from that, the only really area of trouble is tech. I’m still doing all of my email through a webmail interface as I haven’t yet sorted out my desk, and I’m a little suspicious about the complete lack of spam – particularly as I know at least one valid message has been bounced back to the sender and mistakenly marked as spam. My server is playing up, too. I switched it on for the first time in months and it made some very loud fan noises, and now it’s doing a lengthy disk check, with little or no feedback.

So, while I may already feel like part of the road, it’s not Gore’s cliched superhighway.

This is something of a flying blog visit. I can’t believe that it’s now three days since I moved house, but it is. Since then it’s been nothing but unpacking boxes, emptying bags and filling the kitchen cupboards.

As had been planned for some time, Oscar moved in at the same time. He seems a bit dazed by his new surroundings and splits his time fairly evenly between sleeping on the settee and staring out of the patio doors, annoyed that he’s not allowed out yet.

Sal brought him around on Saturday lunchtime, with Will, who wouldn’t have realised that they wouldn’t be living together (or the significance of his starting to crawl and the cat simultaneously disappearing).

Apart from that it’s been all fairly smooth running, apart from the alarm going off this afternoon, which it shouldn’t have done as I had all the sensors changed to be cat-aware.

Meantime, I’m off to make mince pies. I’m cooking for nine on boxing day, which will be the first major test of the appliances. 

Much criticism has been slung at the BBC for the size of its online presence. It’s already had to remove or freeze a lot of its best local content to give other local providers a chance to compete, yet its rivals, like ITV Local simply aren’t up to the task.

The trouble is that when the government legislates it often does so with one ear turned towards lobby groups, and those lobby groups can be so inward looking that they don’t see where the real threats lie.

In restricting what the BBC can and can’t do online, the government isn’t actually giving local rivals a chance to flourish; it’s just opening the door for more massive multinationals to further extend their reach.

The latest encroachment comes, again, from Google. Its already excellent services get better yet, as it now includes bus timetables on its maps. Not only that, but they are time-sensitive so if you search at, say, eleven in the morning, it’ll show you departures between then and noon, not busses already gone (here’s an example).

As with most Google innovations it appeared without notice or fanfare, but its arrival proves once again why the government is wrong to restrict our greatest national info-asset in the interest of ‘local’ producers.

Instead, we should allow the BBC to produce truly relevant domestic content rather than relying on Google to fill the gap. Tying its hands won’t encourage more diverse content from the UK, it’ll just let an even more homogenous entity over which it has even less control do precisely what it’s trying to prevent.

The only way in which restricting the BBC online could be right would be if the government then went on to give local producers the assets they need to compete with the likes of Google.

But that will never happen.

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bbc, google

Well isn’t that nice. I’ve barely dealt with Virgin Media this year, yet they still sent me a biscuit so impressive that it was blogworthy. It came in a sturdy cardboard box that, when you slipped off the lid, let out an rich intoxicating aroma of expensive chocolate biscuitery.

Unfortunately the actual eating experience didn’t live up to the promise of its smell, as the biscuit itself was rather soft (a little stale, perhaps?) and the icing quite brittle, but as the Virgin people won’t have baked it themselves that’s not their fault. It’s also still by far the most impressive edible yet received this Christmas

So the TV arrived this week, and a couple of days ago, with my freshly-minted license to hand, I unboxed it.

It’s huge. Far bigger than I’d expected, or really wanted. Get too close and you could be sucked into the weather map.

The most annoying thing, though, is that it doesn’t have an off switch. Well, it does, but it’s all cased up inside, and if you want to turn it off properly you have to take off the back to where the cable traces through and flick an industrial rocker.

Even the button on the front only puts it in standby.

So, it’s a scrabble around behind an armchair for the plug in the wall every time you want to turn it off properly, which in these apparently more ecologically-aware times is a bit lame.

But then I got to thinking. Is leaving your TV on standby any worse than having an alarm in your house that doesn’t turn off when it’s deactivated? Those little sensors keep on blinking at you as you walk past even if the alarm isn’t actually alarmed, and of course the code panel is always lit up.

And what about the countless hifis in the world, few of which really ever full turn off, instead showing a clock 23 hours of every day and playing music for only one.

Or bedside alarm clocks with glowing digits rather than a passive calculator style LCD with no backlight?

Perhaps TVs on standby are just a convenient whipping boy for all the other eco-unfriendly products in our homes that we’d rather not think about.

Monday night, the PC Pro Awards at the Science Museum, and a good and boozy time was had by all.

It was so hot. I think they’d turned on all the science or something. But the food was good, the drink was plentiful, and I managed to get up on stage and accept an award on Apple’s behalf without tripping up or dropping it, despite the fact it weighed about as much as a breeze block.

Potunkey and Bayon, just before it kicked off

Clockwide from top left: Dharmesh, Me, Ross, Potunkey

Lots more pictures here.

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pcpro, science museum, awards