Christmas week is suddenly here. Look – I’m at home, watching the chickens scratching around in the mud outside the window and pecking at the rain. On a work day.

So we’re getting ready for the festivities. The presents haven’t been wrapped (yet), but the freezer and cupboards are filled with home-cooked food. We’ve made enough lasagne to feed 11, vegetable strudel for six, rum truffles for everyone, 30 cinnamon biscuits, 30 ginger biscuits, plus the extra biscuits made from the off-cuts, lemon curd for spreading on toast and two dozen mince pies for dessert on Boxing day.

Still to make are Sylvia’s biscuits, toffee and the veg and side dishes to go with the meals.

And you know what? It’s actually all very enjoyable. Even the chickens seem to be getting in the festive spirit, and have upped the egg production. We’re now getting a regular supply of pink eggs, presumably from Gerry, to supplement the brown and cream ones we’ve been getting from Margot and Barbara.

She was a late starter, poor girl.

If ever we needed proof:

(Via)

Enduring image of the night: a dalek dancing to a-ha.

It was fancy dress.

Well that’s one question answered: who’s the better mouser.

Me.

Laying in bed this morning, cat fed, tea drunk, listening to the howling wind outside, the cat flap goes and in he trots.

Mnggwwwh.

It sounded like he had his mouth full. Mnggwwwh.

He trotted up the stairs and faffed around for a bit at the bottom of the bed, then the mnggwwwh turned into a proper miow. Strange – it didn’t sound like his mouth was full any more.

Because of course it wasn’t. Now he was blatting the floor with a flat heavy paw as he chased a live mouse around the room. The mouse ran around the bed rather than under it (we’d never have found it under there) and along the landing, with the cat in hot pursuit. It turned into the study and ran under the boxes and cables, which the cat proceeded to knot up with his flying paws as he pursued the little rodent.

Miow miow miow miow.

Squeak squeak squeak.

Then it became a bit of a contest between me and the cat: who could pick it up first. I’m proud to say I won, but not before dismantling most of the study, lifting furniture out onto the landing, shifting piles of papers and dragging yards of cable out of the way.

The poor little thing, when I got it, sat shivering in my hands – probably from the shock – and when I took him to the end of the driveway and sat him down on the pavement he just shook for a bit until I gave him a nudge and he ran off towards next door where they have three cats, not one.

As I came back in the cat greeted me at the foot of the stairs and rubbed himself against my leg. I think he quite enjoyed our joint hunting exploits, even if he was the loser.

Launched back in February, it seems, but almost invisible since then. This is Pepsi’s play for the ‘healthy’ market, on the basis that it’s swapped out the corn syrup for cane sugar, and in doing so slashed the number of calories in every bottle.

Except hmmm.

They delivered crates of the stuff to the office yesterday, and they were liberally passed around the floors. It has a strange aftertaste that left me feeling more thirsty 20 minutes after drinking it than I had been before. It’s syrupy and thick, yet lighter in colour than regular cola, and you can really taste that sugar, like you’re drinking a rich fruit cake.

As for its health credentials, it’s free from preservatives, colouring and additives, but a 300ml bottle – less than you’d get in a can – still contains a third of your daily sugar allowance.

I won’t be buying it.

Metro published the results of its latest poll this morning. Here they are:

Of course it’s worth watching without Wogan. If they’d chosen the right replacement it would be far more worth watching. Wogan should have hung up his Euro microphone years ago.

The question Metro should have asked was ‘Is the Eurovision Song Contest worth watching now that Graham Norton is doing the commentary?’

In my view, certainly not.

Well, it is. I’ll still be watching and singing along and flying the flag for whichever eastern European nation enters the best song (it won’t be Britain, I can tell you now). But that’s in spite of the BBC’s choice of commentator.

Why couldn’t they have chosen someone like Lorraine Kelly, Fern Britton or Sarah Kennedy?

Or indeed all three.

The ultimate case of don’t try this at home. Very funny, though.

I don’t think we’d have stayed for breakfast even if it was included with the room. I’m not sure how clean it would have been.

So, saved that dilemma, we packed up our bags and walked down to Covent Garden by way of all the closed bookshops on Charing Cross Road. We had been wanting to drop in on Foyles. Nixed.

Instead we went to Upper Deck, the cafe at the London Transport Museum, where they serve cheese, beans or mushrooms on toast, frothing coffee and cake. You sit on what looks like old tube train seats, and which rock as much as the real thing when you share them with anyone else.

As you sit there, you look out on the shop – a shrine to the anorak. They sell books full of bus number plates. Why anyone would want one of these and what they would do once they got it home I’ve no idea. Frankly it scares me.

The cheese and the toast, though: excellent. And highly recommended.

Just don’t share your seat with anyone else.

Certainly the most opulent wedding I’ve ever been to.

We headed up to London on a Saturday – something of a rarity for us. It always seems like a good idea until you get to the station. This weekend’s problem was all the trains stopping when they were still five miles outside of the city, tipping us out onto the tube. Not unexpected, but tiresome nonetheless.

We still got to the hotel in time to get changed, eat lunch and break the toilet (in fairness it was already on its last legs) and tube it down to the RSA. That’s the Royal Society of Arts. Very snazz: painted walls, stylish decor and busts (stone variety) on every corner. I went there years ago for a party, but that was confined to the vaults and we didn’t get to see the best bits then. Today we did. They got married in the Great Room, a theatre wrapped in the skillful daubs of John Barry, and his Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture.

Everything was perfect. The string quartet, the staff, the food, the company. Ems was dressed in the most fantastic shoes and dress; Luke in a suit and basketball pumps. A bit like Doctor Who. Perhaps most impressive, though, was the speeches, given in both English and French without a flaw, and spoken like true natives.

The champagne flowed on through the night as we moved back down into the vaults. There we cracked open the huge stack of cheese that was their substitute for an English wedding cake, and the traditional mountain of sugar-spun balls that batted for France, until we left just gone 22h.

What a shock it was to leave such refined surroundings and return to the faulty wiring in our hotel, with its malfunctioning heater, plastic cups and noisy, noisy corridors.

Accommodation aside, it was a fantastic night, and great to see two good friends so well suited and so happy together.

I wouldn’t want to be one of the chickens tonight. This morning I had to boil the kettle and pour it into their water feeder to melt the ice, and that was after I’d already broken the surface. I poured what was left on the bird bath but it didn’t do much.

Tonight it’s even colder. Looking at the thermometer out in the greenhouse, which is likely a bit warmer than the outside air, it’s -2C. What it must be like trying to sleep in a coop wearing nothing more substantial than a feather boa, I don’t know. The poor things stand around all day in the freezing air, looking out of their run and blinking.

I’m sure we’ll be picking up frozen eggs in the morning.