Diary of a Suburban Squeen

How do, chaps! Am back from frozen wastes and plan to now regale you with the post-Christmas post (didja see what I did there? Did you?).

So, Christmas, eh? Vee nice. Got some presents. Went to visit Grandad. Faffed around a bit. Bought some Christmas tat from the garden centre which has sprung up outside Barlborough. Made about sixty-seven tea loaves, and ate one slice of same. Was mostly just ace. Chiefly ace in clothes. Occasionally ace in a nightie.

Anyway, all this is mere fluff and flimsy. FUCKING SOUTH WEST TRAINS!!! is really the message of this post. “Let’s close the line between Barnes and Clapham,” some little twerp in a planning meeting must have said. “The week after Christmas, let’s do it then. Nobody goes to work.” Now, to be honest, I don’t have a problem with their thinking so far. So far, their thinking is rife with reason: of all the weeks in the year, this is probably the quietest in terms of commuting. In choosing this week for closing the line, I applaud their logic.

The part where I staunchly refuse to applaud is the part where they thought, “Well, since nobody goes to work, LET’S NOT FUCKING BOTHER TO MENTION IT TO ANYONE EXCEPT POSSIBLY AS A POST-SCRIPT TO AN OTHERWISE OVERLY-DETAILED CHRISTMAS TIMETABLE POSTER THAT NO-ONE’S ACTUALLY GOING TO READ, because that’s a sturdy plan.” Bastards.

In other news, I have watched the beginning of Leverage, a highly (and somewhat surprisingly) entertaining programme featuring none other than the high-larious Christian Kane. (At one point – look away if you don’t want to be spoiled – he rides a thoroughbred champion, ventre à terre, if I may borrow the expression from Eugenie. Bareback. Awesome!)

Also, I have high hopes of shortly acquiring a bread machine, the pros and cons of which have been carefully discussed, so don’t go giving me that ice-cream-maker-slow-cooker-ooh-you’ll-never-use-it-you-know look. And last night I finally made my celeriac soup. I followed a recipe off the interwebs, but I think I should have just done it my way and shoved some ginger in. Tant pis. Tonight we shall be dining on sausage and tomato risotto with rosemary (yum) and I may make some ginger biscuits, having taken the dough out of the freezer. Possibly some laundry might be in order, as well. Hmmm.

Theatre-wise, just to keep you up to date, we will be going to some Tom Stoppard thing (yay! Stoppard!) at the end of January, and Twelfth Night at the end of Feb. Yoicks! I’ve been dying to see that one, even though we will be up in the Gods. Quite fancy seeing Gethsemane at the National, and getting tickets to see August: Osage County again, since Katie couldn’t make it last time.

Fucking crappity evil arsewiping neanderthal bastards broke into my parents' house yesterday and stole their computer and all their shiny things and my father's nascent DVD collection (of which he is very proud, for it is an extremely fine collection) and almost ALL my mother's jewellery, which is the horrible awful foul part. My father's been giving her jewellery at regular intervals for the last 30 years or so (yes, bearing in mind that they've been together since they were about 17), so there was quite a lot of it larking about in little boxes in the chest-of-drawers. So all the pretty things are gone. And some of them are more or less replaceable and some, like the gold and pearl pendant that was, IIRC, a 21st birthday present from D to M, and which she wore on their wedding day, are completely and utterly irreplaceable. How DARE someone come in and take away the things that mean so much to them. I mean, yes, obviously, material things aren't as important as people blah blah blah, and they can take anything they want as long as they didn't lurk about and hurt my parents, but lots of what was taken had just so much sentimental value and grr argh no words just want to, frankly, stab the evildoers quite badly. And I want to call them a really, really, really rude word, but I won't cuz it's not nice.

I mean, they even took the penny jar in the dining room (worth, at a not-so-conservative estimate, £3.50), and the phone chargers... WTF?