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Archive for December, 2006

My mother sent over a few more pictures that she’d taken at Thanksgiving.

Dasha, Carol and Nick

Dasha, Carol and Nick in front of the hotel

Carol and Matthew

Carol and Matthew in Belgium

Carol in front of the hotel

Carol in front of the hotel

Daisy and Calypso

Daisy and Calypso relaxing in the dining room

After all our excitement on Friday night, we decided to take things easy on Saturday. After spending the morning with the police, we went to Oriel for brunch then headed out to the Kings Road to do a little pre-Christmas shopping. Later in the afternoon, we met up with Aude’s brother, Jerome, and grabbed the train back to Canterbury where we had a quiet dinner at our place.

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, we took the opportunity to put the tree up on Sunday and invited a few friends around to help us decorate it. The cats did their best to help out as well, Calypso supervising from the corner while Daisy jumped right in the middle of things. She spent her day alternatively sleeping in the box of decorations and being pissed off with Jerome (why, we’ll never know).

Mulled wine, Christmas carols on the stereo, and a fire burning away on the TV (hey, these are modern times and I don’t have a fireplace) – just what we needed to get into the Christmas spirit. Just a reminder: three weeks until Christmas!

Trimming the Christmas tree

Matthew and Jerome begin the annual “struggle of the lights” as we try to get the strings around the tree. Note the concentration on our faces…

Trimming the Christmas tree

A crowd of onlookers come to cheer us on!

Trimming the Christmas tree

Not quite like Christmas past – this year it’s all about “Fireplace: The Movie”

Trimming the Christmas tree

Is it just me, or are Anne-Laure and Neil kissing in every photo of them I take?

Trimming the Christmas tree

Is there anyone more excited about Christmas than MG? I doubt it!

Trimming the Christmas tree

MG hangs an ornament on the tree

Trimming the Christmas tree

Aude joins in the fun

Trimming the Christmas tree

Since Jerome’s mother claims that the only updates she gets about her son come from my blog, we’ve decided to start photographing him ‘ransom-style’ with a current newspaper to prove that he is, in fact, still alive.

Another year, another Christmas party, this time in an enormous marquee at Embankment Gardens in London. I’ve been wearing black tie so much recently that I’m beginning to feel like a waiter.

Matthew in black tie

Matthew prepares for his first day at Vesuvio’s Restaurant

The party was pretty much your typical big corporate Christmas event, and was actually one of the better Christmas parties I’ve been to, but the entire night was overshadowed by the fact that we came out to witness a serious assault as we waited for our taxi. Basically, it was drunken partygoer vs. homeless guy, with drunken partygoer being pushed over and cracking his head open.

So instead of a nice, leisurely start to Saturday morning, we were woken up early by a Detective Constable wanting to interview us about the events of the previous evening. No doubt the staff at the Sheraton were not too impressed to see the boys in blue turn up at the door just a week after the whole Litvinenko polonium scare, thinking to themselves that another suite would be out of commission for a month!

Our witness statements prepared and our civic duty done, we decided to head out into Belgravia for some shopping. A block from Sloane Square (one of the most affluent parts of London), we came across this:

BMW on blocks

Not what you want to wake up to…

Canterbury may not be paradise, but there’s not a bone in my body that misses living in London.