Post Christmas Calm

So Christmas has come and gone again and a calm descends on the house. Things started to warm up a week before Christmas when Linda's parents arrived. Luckily I was on trading duty full time as Jerome had his kids before Christmas this year, so I had an excuse to avoid too much interaction with them. By Thursday even Linda was beginning to get a bit fed up with the "inane banter"

By Thursday I had finished work and Linda and I were deep in food buying. I went to Tescos at 6:00am to buy bulk stuff, then we both went to Oxford to collect our turkey and duck, plus a huge amount of other things. As usual, the breakfast at Brothers was a calm half hour in the chaos.

Daughter came home on Friday afternoon, rather the worse for wear after a night out on Thursday. She soon settled in for some serious lying around, napping and watching Frozen Planet on TV. I picked up my mum on the Saturday. She seems to get on ok with Linda's parents, but even she thought they were whining rather a lot about things.

Christmas day cooking was a triumph for Linda as always. Duck for the first time - and very nice too. No board games this year for some reason. Present opening continued into the late afternoon. My chief presents were an A3 photo printer and the latest version of Photoshop, plus a couple of excellent books (Westman's The Copernican Question, Heilbron's biography of Galileo, a book on writing history and the Houellebecq / Levy philosophical argument, Public Enemies).

Boxing Day was spent at Linda's brother's. Lots more food, some football watching, and so on. Linda's parents set off the same time as us and arrived two hours after us. At one point we thought they might have gone home instead.

My mum returned home the next day and seems to have had a nice time. last year she didn't see many people in January and so this year I ought to try and make sure I see her a bit more regularly when she doesn't have her friends coming round.

And so the calm eventually descends. Just the three of us for a couple of days before Daughter returns to London on Friday. Lots of reading, tv watching, more nice meals . . . .