It’s nearly here! The house is decorated, the presents are wrapped, the cards are sent. Phew. We spent the last couple of days away, on our Birmingham Christmas visit. Tomorrow we have our annual drinkies do for the neighbours, and then it will be Christmas Eve.  Battleaxe thought she’d celebrate with a bit of vintage Hollywood movie star glamour. I love these photos where they are apparently decorating their Christmas trees wearing the most unsuitable clothing. Here are two of Jayne Mansfield to start us off.

You can access all these vintage photos by following the links to these sites: https://www.ifitshipitshere.com/vintage-color-christmas-celebrity-photos/?utm_content=cmp-true, and  https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/g5025/vintage-christmas-photos/

So, how was Birmingham? Journeys were fine. We stopped on the way up to see old friends in Oxford. As usual, stayed with old friends Sue and Alex in Moseley. When, as ever, was yomping around the neighbourhood from friend’s house to friend’s house I reflected that I know Philosopher misses the tree-lined roads we used to live in, and undoubtedly, the scenery is so very different to our coastal views here in Hastings. I miss the trees too, but right now the pavements are a squishy mess of fallen leaves… Here is a very atmospheric  old photo of Moseley. The trees, and the big old houses, are still exactly the same.

On our first evening I met my friend Pete in the Kabuli, a new Afghani restaurant in Moseley Village. Had never been to one before, and was curious. It has received excellent reviews and the food was delicious – Battleaxe would recommend. It was interesting for me, who is now a provincial Hastings person living in a very ‘white’ area, to observe our fellow customers.  Very diverse, as you would expect, much younger than I’m used to here, and also clearly very affluent. Many very glamorous women. In the 12 years we have been away ‘middle class-ification’ has expanded enormously. Also, many of the customers looked to be either Afghan or maybe Syrian. It showed the knee-jerk poverty of my thinking – it is easy to forget that large numbers of affluent middle-class people would have left countries like that voluntarily before wars and troubles took over and forced their less fortunate compatriots to leave as refugees.

It is lovely to catch up with old friends, and we had a good time.

I have spent virtually the whole of Sunday carefully not doing any cleaning or preparation for the neighbours drinks do. I tempted Philosopher down to town in the morning. After coffee I went to ESK (our brilliant local discount store), stood admiring the polar bears….

and snapped up a big box of incredibly reduced Xmas tat for Philosopher. Then we had fish and chips. At home in the afternoon I got as far as getting out the hoover but first I had to gift-wrap the tat, then I found a retro light-up Christmas tree behind the telly which I had forgotten so had to set that up, then I discovered that the router booster that powers the internet for this PC wasn’t working properly, so had to sort that, which took ages, then I had a cup of tea, then I attempted to take a photo of Digby posing beside the Christmas tree for the final photo in his social media Advent Calendar, which took even more ages (have you ever tried to get a cat to pose when it doesn’t want to?)  then decided that there wasn’t much point doing too much hoovering because the floor will get dirty tomorrow anyway, so came upstairs to do this blog… ah well, tomorrow is another day. We’ll be off in a bit for drinkies with Jan and Tom…

So here is a bit more vintage glamour to finish off. Perhaps I might have done a bit more cleaning if I’d worn a glittering evening gown…. I do regret how our modern world provides so few opportunities to dress up.

I won’t write again until we are out the other side, so……

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!