Festive-Themed Title!

Good Day to you, my favourite Christmas elves, I would have posted alot earlier but as you will find out shortly, I had rather alot on for every day last week, so where to begin but the day after my last post!

I am an Aston Villa, and because I don't know a bad thing when I see it, not only have I been one all my life, but I have paid for the pleasure of watching them for every home game for the last 12 years. On Saturday they were playing in the televised 5.15pm game against Bolton Wanderers, so like the few hundred people that turned up in the freezing cold December night, rattling around the vast stadium, me and Dan turned out fully expecting a full blooded affair, with the eventual deserved winners being our beloved Villa.....wrong! The game itself was a pretty good one for the neutral fan watching on sky tv in their toasty front room, full of good football and flair in various parts of the game. Unfortunately for us, Villa just couldn't convert any of the many chances they carved out and Bolton converted their only chance, a fairly soft penalty conceded by Stilyan Petrov. So a 1.0 defeat but no matter, me and dan were off for a boogie on the night, and we were gonna bop our little socks off!

As I had no money till pay day on the 21st, I decided to drive to Solihull and so I picked up Dan and Gareth at about 8.45pm and parked in the Council House car park, which is free at night, which is nice. Anyway, we knew that the rest of the gang were in wetherspoons, but as we were closer to Pop World (surely a major copyright issue with the Channel 4 TV show of the same name!), we decided to go into there instead, mainly coz we were meeting there later anyway but also coz it was cold! We bumped into Jason & Gemma on the way there so they joined us in the bar, and a while later we were let into Loft, Loaf, Leaf, or whatever its called. Everyone just calls it Rosies, as thats what it used to be called before one too many people were stabbed, shot or beaten up. So they changed the name, kept the music and hoped it would lead to less deaths, well so far so good!

Now, for those who know what a chav-hole the place is (me included), I was very pleasantly surprised to not only see a very small section of chavs, but hardly anyone under the age of 14, as was the frequent case in the bad old days (although we had to laugh that Dan (25), was ID'd at the door!) Anyhoo, we started out in the main room, which was the dance/house music bit, and after about half an hour, met up with Mark, Katie and her brother, Ben, Kate, Matt and Naomi. As soon as the 80's room was opened up, like salmon swimming upstream, a bunch of us went in and for the next few hours, bopped till we dropped. The music was a cheese-lovers dream, featuring as much festive cheer as you could fit into one night. We must have bopped for most of the night because by about half 12 we were shattered so we left with Ben and Kate. Now, as the gentleman that I am, I offered to give Kate and Ben a lift back to hers, to save taxi fare, and because I assumed she lived quite near to The Swan, where she worked....wrong! We got into the car and Ben said 'you do realise that Kate lives in Northfield'....oh balls! Oh well its an adventure, and the high-pitched laughter from Kate made the journey all the more fun! Anyway got back for just after 1am, and after watching the cricket for a 'few' minutes, got to bed for about half 4!

Sunday: Today was mainly about my car, which I needed to clean outside and inside before I took it back to the Renault dealership to swap for a nice new shiny one, so I spent most of the day washing and hoovering it out, which left it looking all nice and lovely for its next owner.

Monday: 'Twas new car day for me, and the boredom of the average Monday was replaced not only by excitement waiting for 5pm to come so I could go and get my new Clio, but feasting, as it was our office Christmas Buffet, which, as we bought way too much food, lasted all week and possibly into next year! So 5pm came and I drove to the dealership, where, after signing my name 400 times on every document put in front of me (probably should have read some of the docs first!), got into my new clio and instantly loved it. Its basically a prettier version of the old clio, replacing all the curves of the old model with straighter, defined edges and just a bit more class, for example, when you go around corners, little lights appear on the side of your headlights so you can see better round corners. How cool is that! Still need to work out how to operate the doors though. I think they may have left the child-locks on the doors on, but I haven't had any daylight to have a proper look at it yet. Something for the Christmas hols methinks! Anyhoo after getting the car, we decided to have a little drive around for me to get used to the car, although I don't think 40 miles constitutes a 'little' drive does it?

Tuesday: Ah, the one day of the week where nothing happened. Oh how I wish I didn't take that day for granted....

Wednesday: Today was an interesting one. Me, Dan, my mate Jo from college, Gareth, Donna & her parents, Jason & Gemma went to see Jasper Carrott's Rock with Laughter show at the NEC. I picked Dan up and went via Yardley to pick Jo up, before heading down to the NEC for about 6.30. We got to our seats just in time to see a geordie bloke with a guitar as the warm-up act, who was very good. Anyway in the first half of the show, Jasper came on and acted as the compere, introducing acts as they came on whilst doing his own stand-up routine, which as ever was excellent. The acts were Bjorn Again, Jimmy Carr, Lenny Henry, Jethro, Roy Wood (Legend), The Birmingham Royal Ballet, Journey South, Suzie Quatro (Legend). The surprise guest was Ben Mills, who was apparently voted off third in the X Factor. Now, having never heard of him until he came on (don't watch X Factor, too chavvy) I was happy to start with a clean slate with him, and I must say he was very good. He did a cover of Maggie-May, and as he has the same kind of voice as Rod Stewart, did an excellent job, so good luck to him, hope he does something with his career. Only slight disappointment was Journey South, who I thought were trying too hard to impress everyone by shouting a U2 song, which I wasn't happy with, but all in all a good night was had by all. So we all piled back into the car and sang Christmas songs all the way home, which took us up the Coventry Road to Yardley. Now, just after the airport, the speed limit drops from 60 to 40 pretty quickly, so seeing the 40 sign I dropped my speed at a natural pace *flash*, WHAT THE....... oh darn it! So now I'm just waiting for the fine and points to land on my matt, although I didn't think I was driving that fast, but we'll see. So I dropped off Jo then Dan and made my way home with good (and bad) memories of the night!

Thursday: Today I woke up to find that my Clio had 3 tyres and a Sieve. Yes, my car had a slow puncture, so I phoned Renault at lunchtime and they said I could foot-pump it up and drive it to a local garage that they had a contract with. So, before I ventured to the pub on the night, had a go at pumping the tyre up as a test run to see how long it would take, and after 10 mins of building up the muscle in my right leg, the tyre looked fairly ok, but I could hear the air was escaping. So I decided to give it a shot, with Mom driving behind incase I ran out of air and off the road (I do enjoy our adventures!)

Friday: Today was my last day at work, but I was more interested in getting my car sorted, so we got up at a godforsaken time and I started pumping like mad in the dark, which was nice as I got to see the sun rise in a misty, hazy kinda way, which was very Christmassy but blummin cold! Drove to the garage for just before 8am, to be greeted by shuttered doors, yep, they open at 8.30, so I had half an hour to wait, all the time knowing my car was deflating quicker than I would like! So at 8.30 they let me in and in half an hour they were sorted and the bill of £130 was settled (thank god) by Renault, so I had my car back, woohoo! At lunchtime, Mom had a call on her mobile saying the college was sending us home at 2pm, so I went back to the office fully expecting to see an empty office, as everyone else in the office takes a 1-2pm lunch hour, and shock horror the office was in darkness when I got back, and an ironic note was stuck to my desk saying 'Would you mind the phones till 4pm!' from my boss, bless. So, as there was no one in, I logged out of my computer and was about to leave when the entire office jumped out from behind the row of filing cabinets behind my desk and shouted 'SURPRISE'! I swear to god I almost cr*pped myself!

Saturday: Villa lost 3.0 to Manchester United, which was slightly unfair on villa as they played really well up until Ronaldo scored a good solo goal and Scholes scored one of the goals of the season so far, but I don't mind losing to Man Utd, so long as it means Chelsea don't win the league. Can't stand that club for many wonderful reasons, which I won't go into at this stage. Mark Ramprakash won Strictly Come Dancing on the night, which we were thrilled with, as he deserved it on the night with an excellent freestyle dance.

Anyway thats enough from me, just about to go out for some festive drinkies at the pub, before coming home and waiting for Santa to empty his sack under my tree....hang on that doesn't sound nice!

So have a very Merry Christmas and I shall post some post-Christmas/Pre-New Year thoughts in the in-betweeny days to keep the festive cheer going.