Although it hadn’t felt particularly christmassy (maybe we’re just used to the three month build up you can get in the UK when the shops fill with decorations in October and certain parts of the brainstem are directly targetted by Slade or, worse, Shakey) Liz had expressed a desire to have a few folk round for some nibbles and a glass of wine.

MJ (aka Maria Jesús) had previously suggested going out dancing so we decided to combine the two and show off the new flat too.

Liz also bought me a Spanish scrabble set (which includes tiles for “ch” “rr” “ll” and “ñ”) so we thought we might play that too.

We did a fairly standard table full of cold meats, cheese and dips… we even managed to find some humous. What we didn’t know is that dipping is not spanish, and there were a couple of comments along the lines of “what’s this raw carrot for?” In fact, on the humous pack it said “para dipear” which is a hispanicization of ‘to dip’ leading to a discussion about what dip is in Spanish (meter, we decided).

So we dipped, we snacked, we drank wine and toasted a merry christmas. Then at midnight we all trooped out into the chill (-6C, nothing compared to a frosty Yorkshire I know) and off to Rock Circus.

Rock Circus is basically the hard rock cafe, without the eating. As we went in they were playing AC/DC or some such. Saul excitedly recognised Led Zep, I didn’t… and as such, suffered a dent in my muso reputation. Liz demonstrated a fine solo mosh to the new UK crimble number one (which I didn’t recognise either) and drew a few admiring comments from the chaps next to us.

And therein lies the problem with Rock Circus (or lay, because I don’t know if it’s always like that). The average age of the clientele went down when we went in…

After a drink in there we toddled off to Morgana Le Fey, where they played much less recognisable music (made no difference to me), more europoppy, a younger crowd, more noise…

We made our excuses at around 3 and headed home becuase the following day we were up at 7:30 to go walking…

Never got round to the scrabble.