The Best Christmas Present Ever

Well, that's it for another year. We actually had a proper white Christmas, too. Of couse we did, white is all we can see outside our window, but we had some fresh stuff fall, just for a few minutes, but that's all it needs, around 10 yesterday morning.

Anna was delighted with her presents. She had been thrilled the night before by reading Santa's tweets, particularly when he found the time to reply to her. I'm still not convinced it was the real Santa, despite the fact that he knew her name, talked to her about her letter and confirmed that the glitter in the reindeer food is important (helps them fly, apparently), but maybe I'm just an old cynic.

I was relieved that he bought her as many books as he did - we just can't keep her in reading material. Along with the usual stash of Christmas annuals, she was delighted with a book from one of her favourite authors, Michelle Paver, more Michael Morpurgo, the remaining books in a series she had read the first one of at school but they didn't have the rest and, finally, the Guinness Book of Records. Weird? Maybe, but Bob's cousin gave her an old copy (from 2003 I think) a couple of years ago and she was fascinated by it.

For the first time, she's started to show an interest in popular music. Much to Bob's disgust, Cheryl Cole and JLS CDs arrived, although my sister tried to up the taste factor a bit by providing Michael Jackson's This is It.

I was happy with my stack of books - Delia's updated Christmas book, The Brawn Story, by Christopher Hylton, the new Marian Keyes, the Strictly Annual and the memoirs of the Almighty Vince. In a way I'm glad that my husband probably paid full price for the above because he just can't work Amazon. The demise of Borders Books is not a good sign for the traditional bookshop and I don't want to see any others go the same way.

While I got everything on my list and was very happy with it, the best present of all came from Anna. It was an A5 notebook filled with 121 pages of all sorts of things to do with Christmas. It had the words to traditional songs, poems and stories she'd written herself, her own drawings, puzzles she'd made up, her book recommendations, all linked together in her own quirky, very individual way. Unfortuantely she won't let me publish any of the poems or stories here, and she's asked to see this before it gets posted. I guess I have to respect her right to privacy on that one.

I really appreciate the amount of time and thought she's gone to over several weeks preparing it for us - and it's something we'll always treasure. It's not just words on a page, it's a snapshot of our daughter at 10 and a half.

The rest of the day went well - very relaxed, as is the way in our house. I love cooking Christmas Dinner but took a few short cuts - M and S roast potatoes and veg and, to my eternal shame, gravy, so all I had to do was get the turkey ready for the oven, make my Grandma's stuffing, throw the bread sauce together, peel some sprouts and manage the putting in and taking out of things from the oven once the turkey was made. I have, however, saved the turkey juices and the veg water from yesterday, so we will be having proper gravy tonight.

The only fixed point in the day was Doctor Who, but I'll write about that separately. I think I might need to mug up on some Time Lord history first.

Do you like cheese with your mince pies?

I'm on a bit of a quest to prove that I'm not the only one in the world who likes to eat mince pies made with puff pastry with a slice of cheese.

I have to say that I don't mind if I am the only one in the world who likes them that way because I'm not one to conform for the sake of it, but surely I can't be alone.

Brief mentions of this strange habit in the Twitterverse have brought howls of disbelief and the word "weirdo" was used at one point. Not in any sort of seriousness and by one of the loveliest people in my world and with an x attached, but it was used.

Another friend mentioned that it's tradition in Yorkshire to have Christmas cake (without icing) with cheese so mince pies have a lot of the same flavour. I think doing it this way in our family comes from my Grandma who never had her mince pies any other way. I eat sweet ones too, but if I make them it's always as an accompaniment to cheese.

Anyway, if you have never heard of doing it this way, and think it sounds appealing, why not try it?

Snow, Glitter and Dentists - our story of Christmas so far.

This is the view outside our house - or at least it was yesterday morning. Not much has changed since then except it's got colder. I am completely pathetic about it and just won't go out in it. End of. No exceptions. I fell on ice and couldn't walk for 5 months in the early 90s and that's left me with an almost phobic hatred of the stuff. The snow itself is very very pretty and nice to look out on. I'm just very very glad we don't have to travel anywhere and am very grateful to my husband and daughter who have done sterling work trudging back and fore to the shops to ensure we have supplies for our Christmas Dinner. I don't remember as bad snow as this since the Winter of 1990. I remember that being quite close to Christmas as well. We lived in Nottinghamshire then and lost the power and water for about 3 days. Thankfully at that time we had a coal fire and the local Chinese takeaway soldiered on and provided the entire village with sustenance.

One of the vital supplies I was missing this morning was glitter, for the special homemade reindeer food. I mentioned this on Facebook and was met with a storm of protest from various people that this could be dangerous for them. Well, all I can say to the Elf and Safety mob is that, as any fule no, Santa's reindeer aren't just ordinary run of the mill specimen. They are, as Anna pointed out, magic, flying reindeer and they have diffeent needs. We've been giving them our classic recipe of one part crushed weetabix, one part oats and one part glitter for many years and we haven't lost one yet. It's at times like this I really miss Costigan. He'd have put paid to the tabloid style scaremongering!

I have never seen Anna so excited about Christmas. She just loves the snow and spends every spare moment out sledging. Our lovely friends Anne and Stevie have taken her to the local park with their children every single day. Bob went too yesterday and was very grateful from the sustenance he got from Stevie's hip flask. Perhaps this helped to protect him from the pain when a whopping great bit of his incisor came out. The poor man has had to go to the dentist this afternoon to get a filling. He has a habit of Christmas dental emergencies - when we were in Mallorca 3 years ago he lost a filling. Thankfully, that one didn't involve any pain or urgent treatment.

So, we're finally ready for what we hope will be a quiet, chilled out Christmas. The house is an absolute tip, because I haven't found the energy to give it the scrubbing it needs, but I don't care that much. Frankly, when I do have energy, I prefer to use it in more interesting ways than cleaning. I probably take the ethos that people and fun are more important than housework too far, but there are worse things, I guess.

My wish for you, dear reader, is that you have a peaceful and relaxing festive period and that 2010 is a happy, healthy year for you.

By the way, if you are looking for a wee bit of Christmas Eve fun, you can track Santa on his travels. I live blogged this last Christmas Eve which was probably strictly speaking unnecessary, but it brings back happy memories.

F1: He's Back - Michael Schumacher and Ross Brawn together again

You may remember that I got a tiny bit excited in the Summer when Michael Schumacher announced his albeit short lived return to F1. Unfortunately, that didn't come to fruition because of his neck injury at the time, but that episode clearly poured fuel on that one smouldering ember of passion for being a full time racing driver. I guess it's a bit like being thrown back into an election campaign at full pelt having sworn you'd never do it again because the last one nearly killed you. That passion and drive never really leaves. It might occasionally hide, but it'll always be there.




Today, he threw his hat into the ring for next season, not with the team that's been his home since 1996 and where he was a consultant, often seen at Grands Prix, but with the genius who guided him to his seven world titles, Ross Brawn, who is now team principal of Mercedes GP. I guess for a man who last year saved the doomed Honda team at 59 minutes past the eleventh hour and then led it to victory in both drivers' and constructors' championship, luring the best racing driver of all time out of retirement is child's play.

Some of the translation in this statement from his official website is a little weird but I have to say it brought a bit of a tear to my eye. The passion he has for the sport just jumps out and grabs you by the throat.

The BBC got an exclusive interview with him which you can watch here. He's on sparkling form. I do think, though, that Mercedes really ought to get some new microphones because the one he's holding looks very silly.

Much of the excitement and drama of this year's F1 season has taken place off the track, with the threat of a breakaway series, the stooshie over the future of the British Grand Prix and the scandal of Crashgate. Next season we are promised a treat on the road. By the time we got to Abu Dhabi in November, Brawn, Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren were all up there with similar cars. Qualifying session thrillers, going down to thousandths of a second on the last flying lap were commonplace. Now Mercedes have given themselves an ace by reviving the best driver/strategist combination in F1.

There's always the risk that it won't be as good. I can't imagine the working relationship between Brawn and Schumacher changing though. The two of them trust each other implicitly and work very well together. Schumi really has nothing to prove, though. He's won seven world titles. He is one of the best drivers there has ever been, if not the best. He will still have all of that and maybe even more titles to his name. He will simply take the car he's given and push it to the absolute limit of its being. It's what he does.

I don't see why he shouldn't be whip the backsides of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton at McLaren, Vettel and Webber at Red Bull and Alonso and Massa at Ferrari. I doubt any team will get off to the commanding lead that Brawn and Jenson Button created last year though so I think it'll be thrilling. Schumi's also older and a lot wiser than he was 15 years ago.

You can hear Ross Brawn talking about his view of it all here.

I think what worries me is that the tabloid press is going to try and get up a frenzy of hatred towards him. They'll paint Mercedes as the German team, despite it being based in Britain and run autonomously by an Englishman, and McLaren (with its German Mercedes engines) as the British team and we all now how rational they can be when they do that. It's all going to be one spiteful yawn.

Anyway, I'll be supporting Schumacher and Ross Brawn all the way. And of course, Mercedes announced this week that the worlds of F1 and Harry Potter will combine as they now have a patronus. Oh, wait.......

David Steel to speak at Gladstone 200th Anniversary Event

Sometimes I'm too trashy even for my liking. How on earth can I have been an active Liberal Democrat for over a quarter of a century without knowing that one of the most famous Liberals of all time, four time Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, shared the same birthday as my beloved Granny, 29th December? Obviously not the same year, as the GOM (Grand Old Man, or God's Only Mistake as Disraeli rather snippily put it) was born on 29th December 1809.



The eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted that this means that come next Tuesday it's 200 years since Gladstone was born. Scottish Liberal Democrat Nigel Lindsay has organised a wreath laying ceremony for 10 am at the statue of Gladstone in Coates Crescent, Edinburgh.

Yes, I know it's horrendously early and it's probably going to be freezing cold, but this is history, and an event worth commemorating. David Steel is going to be speaking at the ceremony and that's definitely worth getting out of bed for. The statue is literally a few minutes' walk from Haymarket station and there are plenty nearby coffee houses we can go to for thawing out purposes afterwards. So, if you're in or around Edinburgh next Tuesday, 29th, at 10 am, you are very welcome to come along and honour the life of an iconic Liberal.

Auntie's moral compass flushed down the toilet as BBC asks "Should gays be executed?"

Well, I thought I was unshockable.

Until this lunchtime.

Until I came across this.

I really hope that by the time you read this that link has been taken down because someone has seen sense and realised how utterly objectionable it is.

I am speechless (and that takes a lot) that a corporation with a reputation for being the best public service broadcaster in the world has seen fit to host a discussion entitled "Should homosexuals be executed?".

I can't believe that they think that this is a legitimate question for discussion and, what's particularly worrying is that the fact that it might lend credibility to the harbingers of hate who are trying to introduce the appallingly bigoted legislation in Uganda.

Andrew wrote passionately the other day about why this legislation is just so wrong.

For the BBC to promote discussion on this topic could be seen as inciting hatred. If they'd put "should black people be executed?" it would have rightly have been against the law so why do they think that they can get away with this?

If you are as outraged as I am, please complain to the BBC here.

UPDATE: The ink was barely dry on this post when the BBC finally seems to have realised it may have dropped a big one. They have changed the header to "Should Uganda debate gay execution?" which isn't really much better. I mean, you can't really answer yes to that question without infringing their rules of posting which are:

"We reserve the right to reject messages which:

* Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable"

They've also closed this particular debate down which I guess is progress.

High Noon at Home Office - Free Gary Demo today

If you happen to be in Central London this lunchtime, and you support Asperger's sufferer Gary McKinnon's case not to be extradited to the US on computer hacking charges, you might like to support his family and friends as they gather at the Home Office between 12 noon and 2 pm to protest at the Government's failure to protect him from an unfair process.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will be there lending his support as he's supported Gary's case from the start.

Gary's mother, Janis Sharp, has fought tirelessly for her son and deserves our support.

She wants those of us who live too far away from London to send a card to the Queen asking her to intervene with the Government on Gary's behalf on the basis that she effectively signed away UK citizens' rights on the advice of the Government. Obviously the Queen is never going to intervene publicly. However much the idea of Her Majesty nabbing Alan Johnson, Joanna Lumley style, at a public event appeals, it would be wrong for an unelected monarch to do so. She does, though, meet Gordon Brown once a week and if she gets a lot of cards, she might discuss it with him privately. Anyway, it can't do any harm.

I'm 500 miles away so I can't be there physically but will be in spirit.

Marion Lindsay: Remembering my Grandma 25 years on

I've written before about what a wonderful influence my Granny has been on my life, but I've never told you about my other fantastic Grandma. Between them, these two inspiring and very different women helped to shape the person I am today.

Marion Lindsay was my other Grandma. She passed away 25 years ago today, when I was 17. Her death was really the first time I had experienced that horrible, searing pain of loss that cuts right through you every part of your mind and body. I miss her to this day. I'm maybe a bit surprised that I feel quite so emotional as I write this.

Whereas my Granny was a traditional granny, grey haired, full of stories and gentleness, Grandma was a much more glamorous, tempestuous character. Others in the family had a very different experience of her but I can only really speak for my own which was a fun filled, happy, close relationship. There was hardly ever a cross word between us.

She was heavily involved in amateur dramatics, in the Florians drama group in Inverness. The first practical experience I can remember of this was when I had to run up and down the stairs so my breathless voice could be recorded to be the voice of a ghost in the Noel Coward play Blithe Spirit where Grandma was playing Madame Arcati.

She was also an incredibly talented artist. I remember having to sit for hours when I was four or so while she painted me. I remember the blue dress with red and white flowers I was wearing but the painting, unfortunately, no longer exists. My parents have in their house a portrait of my father as a choir boy when he must have been around Anna's age and a still life that she did.

When I was very small, I spent mostly all my weekdays with my Granny and my weekends with Grandma. After I went to school, I went to Grandma's most Saturday afternoons. I don't remember anything other than fun. I had a puppet theatre there - I particularly remember having the scenery and characters for Aladdin and we used to enact all sort of scenes. She was always very keen on getting me to write things down and use my imagination. I've never really been that great at that sort of creativity but she squeezed every tiny morsel of potential in that direction out of me.

Grandma was not exactly an advert for healthy living. She smoked like a chimney and to this day, I still find the smell of cigarette smoke mildly comforting, which was no doubt a factor in me taking up the habit myself when I was a teenager, an addiction which only pregnancy and motherhood would rid me of. She was a complete sun worshipper, too. I remember many happy afternoons, in her garden, watching her baste herself with factor 2 Hawaiian Tropic which is another smell that I absolutely love. There's a photo of her, on her 60th birthday, taken at my uncle's house in Canada where she's looking amazing in a bikini.

She was also a complete and total devoted Thatcherite. Remember when Maggie did her "The lady's not for turning" speech - at the same time, Grandma was involved in a production of Christopher Fry's play "The Lady's not for Burning." Grandma actually rang up Downing St to ask if she could display a big cardboard cut-out of Mrs Thatcher saying "What I really meant to say was go and see "The Lady's not for Burning." Of course they said no, but she said they were quite tickled by the idea. She was mildly exasperated by my growing liberalism and peace-loving hippyness but she coped with good humour.

I don't think I ever doubted her love and pride in me. I remember the day after my Higher results came through in the Summer of 1984 a parcel arrived for me containing a beautiful ring, which I still treasure along with the heartfelt letter that accompanied it - on pig paper, of course.

She was obsessed with pigs - she had them everywhere. Cuddly pigs, pig plates, pig tea towels, pigs made of glass, metal and pottery. There were hundreds of them and that probably explains why I have a bit of a soft spot for them.

When we moved from Inverness to Wick when I was almost 12, it was devastating to no longer see her regularly. I'd speak to her on the phone and used to still go to stay with her but it was never enough. When I was 15, she developed bronchial cancer which must have been absolutely terrifying for her. She laughed it off, though, buying herself a beautiful 3 colour gold bracelet which she called her "I stopped smoking cos it gave me Cancer" bracelet. The last time I saw her was in October 1984, when we went for lunch at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness and you could tell how the disease had grimly taken control of her.

I suppose every blog posting worth its salt has to turn to food at some point, and it's worth saying that two of the most delicious things I've ever tasted in my life were my Grandma's gravy and my Granny's potato soup. Neither I nor anybody else has ever been able to replicate them exactly.

I might have been at the back of the queue when common sense was being handed out, as my mother always used to tell me, but if that meant I was at the front of the line for amazing grandmothers, I'd say that it was a price well worth paying.

Sports Personality of the Year - why I won't be voting for Jenson Button

You would think, wouldn't you, after all the F1 posts I'd put you through detailing my obsession with Brawn GP during the course of the season, that their World Champion Driver Jenson Button would be my first choice for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, due to take place at Sheffield Arena tomorrow night.

Well he's not. I'm quite cross with myself for being so grumpy about it, but I just can't forgive the way he left Brawn. If Ross Brawn and Nick Fry had just laughed it off, then I might feel better, but it's clear that he has seriously annoyed them.

I'm not normally one for holding grudges and it's not the fact that he's gone to McLaren. People change jobs all the time and he had the perfect right to do what he wanted. It's more the way he went about it. Almost from the second he won the championship, stories started to appear in the papers about how underpaid he was at Brawn, and how, bless he'd had to have his own overalls cleaned. I just felt he was behaving like a spoiled brat. Sure he'd won the Championship in a season that had turned out to be a struggle after a flawless start, but he's 30 years old, for goodness sake, and he was acting like a prat.

Then, on Friday 13th November, he went to visit the pretentiously named McLaren "brand centre" in Woking. Not subtly, you understand. The press were made aware of it with McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh coyly saying he'd just popped in to say hello.

I guess there was nothing McLaren wanted to do more than stick two fingers up at Brawn. After all, Whitmarsh knew fine that Mercedes was buying the Brackley team and ending its partnership, albeit gradually, with McLaren. I guess it's the sporting equivalent of introducing your husband to someone and then watching as the other two go off together. The desire for revenge is perhaps understandable. For McLaren. What Jenson was doing allowing himself to be used by the McLaren machine to that end is beyond me. As much as Brawn needed him to come up with the goods, there is no doubt in my mind that he would not be world champion if it were not with for the Brawn Team's genius in coming up with a car that was so much ahead of the field at the start of the season.

All I've written before, about how Jenson completely deserves to be World Champion and how well he'd done for the team still stands and how loyal he'd been by staying with the team last year, but I can't forgive the disrespectful and discourteous manner in which he left the team that had helped him to achieve his dreams.