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Last night was our Christmas party, and it was a good ‘un – predictably!  I can’t remember much about the latter stages as I spend a good eight hours imbibing freely on beer, wine and Jack Daniels – and have spent much of today feeling decidedly ropey!

It was a top night – and the standard of costumes and inventiveness was as high as ever amongst the team.  The theme was ‘movie titles’ and everyone made a great effort – which is ace!

My own Jango Fett costume (which I loosely translated to an obscure film called ‘Bounty Hunter‘ or – even more obscurely – a series of spaghetti western films called ‘Django‘ (one of them, amusingly, called ‘Django the bastard‘!

But for my holster belt breaking early in the evening, and a near-mishap involving me being desperate for a piss when there were no conveniences nearby, the whole night went very much according to plan and a great time was had by all!

Photos are here, here and here – unfortunately Facebook limits you to 60 photos per album!

Something for us all to look forward to! 😆

I’m a fine one to talk, as I don’t do this – but well, from an individual I think that’s okay.

But tonight I watched Gordon Ramsey’s ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ programme, where Gordon came to Nottingham to help sort out ‘The Curry Lounge’ in the city centre.  But that’s by the by, I’m a fan of his anyway, so was intrigued to see him at work in my beloved hometown.

And what struck me was that the interludes in and around the city were the amongst the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of Nottingham on the telly.  Normally it’s a pair of fuckwits – that patronising bastard and his pinch-faced harridan of a sidekick – on Channel Four, taking a bunch of shoddy statistics and suggesting that it’s a den of iniquity and the fourth worst place to live in the country.

So how nice to see, in a few short segments, shots of the square – the view of the city from Trent Bridge, a bit of the culture and people who weren’t either drug dealers, chavs or leering mongs.  It was the best piece of PR that Nottingham has had in ages – and it happened completely by accident because a restaurant happened to apply to be on Gordon’s show.

So take note powers-that-be at the council etc.  I want to see more of this kind of representative imagery relating to Nottingham in the future, rather than the usual dirge of binge-drinking or gun crime that the media usually regurgitates with regular and inaccurate tedium.

It’s the annual C&MI Christmas Party on thursday, so if you see a bunch of people dressed in outlandish fancy dress costumes then be sure to say hello!

I’m not feeling remotely festive this year – I’m not a big fan of Christmas in it’s superficial nor spiritual sense anyway, but usually look forward to festivities and a chance for a bit of downtime amongst family and friends with lots of food and drink.  Maybe once I get my costume all packed up to take to work on thursday it will all start to feel more real.

I have managed to get all my festive shopping done and dusted though, I did have a brief excursion to my employer but as last year, a good 90%+ has been completed through the wonderful phenomena of online retail.  I don’t like being amongst crowds of people (except at football, of course!) nor do I like shopping – so getting stuff online, generally for better prices, and delivered straight to you has to be a winner!

Felt what could be a cold coming on today, and since Cat had an evil one last week, I’ve been assaulting my nostril’s with Vicks ‘First Defense’ which supposedly should have a decent chance of stopping a cold developing if you catch it early – it better bleedin’ well had do, it’s our Christmas party next week and I don’t plan on being ill for it!

I had a rather pisspoor game of football last night – and whatever it was that prevented me running about much and made all my passes go astray, it clearly affected Forest too.  That said, Forest were playing our perpetual bogey-team Walsall – so a defeat wasn’t exactly unexpected when visiting the Bescott Stadium.

…. BRING ON THE SCOUSERS!!! 🙂 *

* Should Forest beat Luton in the FA Cup 2nd Round, we get to play the red scum at the City Ground!

.. after bemoaning my footballing lot yesterday, I was lucky that the Virgin Media chappie arrived very much in time for me to play football, I lost count of goals – but I think I netted five in all, but most importantly two against Sanj who has proven unbeatable for me in the past when he has a spell in goal!

Virgin Media TV looks okay – not dramatically different to when I had it back in a rented house in Wollaton, but Setanta sports will come in handy – and the TV on demand feature is pretty damn funky, I’ve already partaken in an episode of Green Wing – all of which are saved on there, and it played perfectly!

Tomorrow finally Forest are playing again – entertaining Crewe at home, so fingers crossed for that one, and failing getting any enjoyment from that, we’re hot footing it to a pub afterwards to watch Derby entertain Chelsea, which should surely be rewarding?

.. this has been a week of frustrations, it’s a pretty busy time for me at work, so to find out something we’ve been working on was rendered useless by some errors that weren’t really our doing was frustrating – but I suppose that’s life!

This busy-ness was compounded by me needing Wednesday morning off to attend a mysterious appointment the hospital made with me – only to find it was routine, and not only that, completely unnecessary as I had been for the same thing earlier in the year, but they’d lost my records!  Ah well, it was nice of the doctor himself to take some time out I suppose, I need to go back now for an ECG scan… bah!

The final frustration came this evening, at football I was on “the team that shall not pass” – which was annoying, the couple of times I was deigned acceptable to pass to when getting forward I scored, twice!  We wouldn’t have lost if we’d played like a team instead of trying to give it the ‘flash Harry’ types – that is irksome.  But never mind!

I guess the next thing to frustrate me will be that I need to be home tomorrow afternoon and await a Virgin Media engineer, who will turn up between 1pm and 6pm – if he turns up before 3:00pm, I’ll be delighted as I’ll get a game of football that will hopefully be more satisfying than this evening’s – that said, he’ll turn up at 5:59pm rendering yet another afternoon away from work utterly pointless, knowing my luck!

Ho hum!

.. as given by me in the guise of Chewbacca for Radio Nottingham during the world-record wobble board attempt on Friday in aid of Children in Need!

A more sensible interview post-wobble actually aired apparently, but this one is more amusing!  Thanks to Neil for digging it out for me!