December 24, 2004
Making a bad time worse
Having Donald Rumsfled drop in unexpectedly for mince pies on Christmas Eve must rank up there with the worst things that could possibly happen during the festive period. Apparently though, Radio 4 tells me, he served the troops with cool stuff like boiled beef and potatoes. I'm assuming that it was salt beef but the otherwise excellent BBC News website doesn't say what was on the menu.
I dropped in to Liverpool Street Station this afternoon on a futile quest to find my wife a copy of Oliver!, the musical film. She's been hugely disappointed that it's not on telly this Christmas. Strangely enough neither branch of WH Smith's had it in stock. By way of a weird general act of revenge on humanity (and me mostly) she made me sit through an hour or so of My Fair Lady, dim-witted drivel featuring that well known heart throb Rex Harrison. Liverpool Street was bonkers and full of angry-looking people with huge suitcases standing around staring at the departures board.
Anyway, we're at home over Christmas, shacked up with a selection of overproof beers, a bottle of sherry and a plastic 2L bottle of industrial rose wine and a happy turkey from Waitrose (well, as happy as you'd be floating upside-down overnight in a bucket of salted water with bits of star anise, onion, an orange, peppercorns, sugar and golden syrup. This is a Nigella idea to ensure it doesn't dry out. Instead it looks like a bloated corpse that's been dragged out of some river weeks after the initial drowning.). Merry Christmas.