On December 11th and 12th I took a couple of days off work which were
ostensibly so that 
bopeepsheep could catch up on some much-needed
sleep while I looked after smallclanger. In fact she found it
difficult to sleep much during the day, but she did get a bit more rest than
usual so she felt rather better by the end of the weekend. I went to B&Q
for some shelves and spent a fair amount of Friday putting them up. I don't
think we did anything special at the weekend, though on Sunday evening
we joined in with a Christmas baking-and-carolling session at Wesley Mem
(but we cheated by taking shop-bought mince puffs).
On Tuesday 16th we were to sing carols in the nursing home at Merton (near
Bicester) with a select group of people from Wesley Mem, followed by a
carol service at the nearby village of Murcott with slightly more people from
Wesley Mem and other local churches. The plan was that I would leave work
early and arrive home not long after 4:30pm so that we could jump in the
car and take smallclanger to his Granny's and still be at Merton
by 6:15pm. Well for various reasons we didn't leave until
almost 5:30pm and it took the best part of an hour to get to Witney
because of very slow-moving traffic on the A40 (the roadworks didn't help,
but they didn't seem to be the cause). So we arrived at the nursing home just
as the carollers were returning to the lobby for an aprês-chanson mince pie.
However, this did mean that we were in time for the service at Murcott, and
some informal singing afterwards. Had a bit of a scare on the way home when
on a dark country road I accidentally switched the windscreen washer on instead
of the full headlights and it just happened to be at this moment that we came
to the T-junction at the end of the road. Fortunately, no harm was done.
On Saturday 20th we were supposed to go to an informal carol-singing
session with some neighbours of bopeepsheep's parents - but it was
cancelled because the pianist had just become a new grandmother and was away
visiting the baby. But we still visited bopeepsheep's parents
anyway, and played Scrabble.
Sunday 21st was quite busy as it was Wesley Mem's carol service in
the evening, which required me to be there at 4pm for rehearsal. It was a
good service and bopeepsheep managed to get there only a couple of
minutes late despite the appallingness of the buses. After the service, while
sampling the mince pies and biscuits, we tried to collar the minister so as to
set the wheels in motion for smallclanger's christening; however,
after the initial "hello"s someone else interrupted. bopeepsheep
didn't feel like waiting, so we left it for another time (but alas we haven't
managed that yet for various reasons).
On Monday evening I attempted to come home early from work - although it wasn't that early because I'd had rather a long lunch break out trying to find a suitable birthday present for my Dad. By about 8pm it became clear that we weren't going to make it out of the house for our trip North, so we postponed until early the next morning. Although we didn't get up quite as early as intended, we were still out by about 9am and so made it to Bolton by lunch time - and we gave my Dad his birthday present.
To be continued. . .
