To quote my dad's old line "an elegant sufficiency" was had.

I'm home after three weeks, the house is still standing and it's warm, that'll do to be going on with.

I had intended to post once or twice over Christmas, while popping down the road from my mother's to visit my sister, but that turned out to be an exercise in futility. No problems getting on the net, the problem was 11 kilos of hyperactive cocker spaniel worming her way into your lap to help! At 11kg Poppy's pretty much fully grown, but still definitely an adolescent in her behaviour. OTOH it's nice to be greeted by someone wagging her tail so hard it starts at her nose.

It snowed lightly the day after I got up to Durham, enough to last overnight, then was ridiculously mild until this week, with a touch of snow on Monday that's still on the ground in places, and then the last couple of nights were down to -4C. And of course it started to snow heavily just as we started to load the car to take me to the station. We were unexpectedly entertained while waiting at the station, there's a piano in the waiting room, and one of the three young lads who work at the station was playing a medley of Abba tunes, and was surprisingly good. There was a somewhat alarming announcement on the train south "Sorry for the delayed departure from Doncaster there, that was due to having to wait for some assistance from the British Transport Police" Eek! The snow petered out somewhere south of York though, so I got home in drizzly rain just as the light was fading. Not exactly the way to see Chatham at its best. (Not that Chatham's best amounts to much at the best of times).

It was a quiet Christmas as we mostly weren't going out - Omicron! - and Christmas dinner courtesy of my sister and brother-in-law had to count as non-traditional - no turkey! I wasn't consulted on this, but I think I'm the only one in the family who really likes turkey, so I can't complain too hard. OTOH beef instead of turkey is very much a first world problem. The exception to the mostly not going out was my brother-in-law, who was popping down the local pub regularly. As he wanted to see his brother last Sunday we popped over to Hartlepool, kicked him out at his brother's local, and the rest of us went on to Seaton Carew, where Poppy took my sister for a walk on the beach and my mother and I spent an hour in an amusement arcade. We'd expected there not to be many people about, but apparently everyone else had had the same idea so it was packed like it was Midsummer.

The three of us being the only people I saw wearing masks on the street may explain why the North East's Omicron figures are rapidly catching up with the rest of the country, though it was a bit better in the arcade. And then of course the inevitable happened. Not only did my brother-in-law's brother test positive on Monday, but so did whoever he'd sat next to when he popped out to the pub on New Year's Eve, So breakfast on Tuesday morning was lateral flow tests all round. Fortunately we all tested negative and have stayed that way. (Covid also worked its way through my brother-in-law's son, daughter-in-law, both grandkids, and his daughter's husband over the holidays).

Anyway, I hope everyone else had a happy and covid-free Christmas and New Year, and that we can get (mostly) shot of the bloody thing this year!
 

Not so much mine, because I already wasn't planning to travel, but Boris just held a press-conference and they've just cut a five day national travel window (due to start in four days) and up to three households together for Christmas, to one day and two, and that only if you don't live in Kent (where I am), London and parts of the South East, which are back into full lockdown now christened Tier 4, with no set expiry.

The reason is a new Covid variant that seems to have evolved in Kent in September, and is already running at over 60% of cases in the South East due to increased transmissability, seemingly about 70% above the common strain. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be any more lethal, but it pushes R up by about .4 from what it was.

That short notice is going to be awkward for people who weren't planning on Christmas at home, but fortunately for me I'm well stocked, and I have another food delivery due on the 28th that I can tweak as needed.

But in better news, my mother just had the vaccination about an hour ago, and so did a whole bunch of her cronies. From her description, it was even less of an event than getting the flu vaccine, apart from needing to hang around for 15 minutes afterwards in case of allergic reaction. Boris mentioned that around 350,000 people have already had it, so they're definitely not hanging around.

 

I've had several dreams in the last week, including at least one micro-dream in a micro-sleep, where I've been doing things like get on the train to head up to Durham for Christmas.

Sorry, dream-brain, but that ain't happening this year, get with the programme.

So I've confirmed with my family I won't be up for Christmas. I probably would have bailed anyway given the local Covid spike - my local MSOA* just overtook my family's home MSOA wrt infection rates (335 vs 327, but theirs is falling and mine's still rising), while the Gillingham Northwest MSOA is about two miles away and is at 662 cases/100,000 and rising sharply - but Boris's plans for Christmas travel chaos just hammered that message home.

If you haven't been paying attention to Boris's wizard scheme, the plan is the whole UK gets five days centred on Christmas with all Tier-based restrictions on travel lifted and up to three households allowed to mix. This is pointless for me anyway, because I always need at least one day, if not two, to recover from the all-day journey, so at most I'd have two days at home in a fit state to function, and possibly as little as one. And it wouldn't just be me trying to travel, it'll be everyone. Which is a particular problem, given that I need a wheelchair space on the train, and there are only three or four per train, possibly even less if any are ruled out due to Covid spacing. I've had "we'll have to change you to a later train, all the wheelchair spaces on that one are already booked" two or three times even when travelling midweek and offpeak. Trying to do it when everyone in the country will be trying to travel split over just two days pre-Christmas is asking the impossible (most of my journey is on the East Coast Main Line, one of the only two north-south mainlines, so I'd be trying to get on the same train as about half the country).

I've already seen a tweet from someone claiming every seat on every train between London and Newcastle is already booked, and the Office of Rail and Road telling the train companies they've got to do better about saying which seats are available - it's possible these two are linked, and it's actually just currently publicly released seats that are booked out, but it's still not a good omen. I've had nightmarish journeys in normal times, so this time I'm opting out in advance.

So good job my sister and I've got the Echo Shows, because Christmas dinner is going to be virtual.

* Medium Layer Super Output Area, a census neighbourhood of 5-7.2k people

It's been surprisingly mild up here in the North East, in fact I've traded back down from the duffel coat I've been wearing to the much lighter jacket I travelled up in as the temperatures have peeked/peaked up into double figures. While it's been intermittently damp and drizzly, the only really bad day we've had was when Storm Deidre blew through weekend before last, which had the interesting phenomenon of rain freezing into pebble-like lumps as it hit the ground. Crunch. Fortunately that quickly progressed from ice to snow to rain and was gone by morning.

Not being able to get online after Amazon stuffed up my data SIM order combined unfortunately with Office deciding to throw a wobbly over whether I had a license or not, which meant I couldn't work on any of the projects I might have put time into instead, I thought maybe I'd messed up the license renewal (i.e. forgotten it), but getting online at my sister's confirmed it's on auto-renew. I'd just given up on an hour of trying to sort it out when it decided to spontaneously resolve itself. Grrrr.

Since having got Word back I've reworked one short story, written about 80% of another, which has been a first couple of lines hovering about in the back of my head for months, and an idea for a third has popped up - though that one may come under character background rather than being a viable story idea, we'll see. Plus I've done some work on a hobby Excel project I largely save for when I'm up here.

My sister and I did the local pub quiz on Sunday. We didn't win, but we did respectably. Andrea took great pleasure in pointing out we'd have been much closer to winning but for going with my (wrong) choices rather than hers on four questions. Of course we would have been rather less close if we hadn't gone with my choice on others - one or two of which were surprisingly hard for what's billed as a fun quiz- "Who preceded Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor?" Seriously? That's pre-Thatcher - {smug}and it was Denis Healey {/smug}.

I was back in the pub for a quiet drink on Christmas Eve with Andrea and her husband (after Not-Midnight Mass), which was a pleasant evening, though I was quite surprised to see the extended family (three,maybe even four generations) at the next table over whip out a pack of "Cards Against Humanity" and start having great fun, it was noticeable it was the c70-ish grandparents/pub regulars cackling loudest at the lewdest cards/plays.

Christmas Day was pleasantly quiet,with the added advantage of no one in the family being ill on the day for about the first time in three years. We kept to our now tradition of having Christmas dinner at Dad's care home,which was perfectly presentable - prawn cocktail or tomato soup followed by turkey, pigs in blankets, roasted potatoes, mashed potatoes, baby carrots and brussels - they had slightly drowned mine in gravy, but it was good gravy, and either Christmas pud or Black Forest gateau (yum) to finish. The glass of white wine they served first was a bit ordinary, but the bottle of rose they brought around to follow was incredibly smooth and decidedly drinkable. Our server, Victoria, one of Dad's regular carers, was dressed head to foot as one of Santa's elves - hat with pointy ears, green tunic, multi-coloured tights, and it was just as well she had the pointy shoes with the bell on the end as it meant I missed her toes when I accidentally trod on her foot at the end of the meal! The only downside was Dad was having one of his 'today I shall mostly be sleeping' days, but he surfaced enough to smile at everyone every now and then and he's been sharper on other days.

Amazon have now compounded the SIM package without the SIM by delivering my sister's Christmas present to her husband, which I'd ordered for her as I have Prime, to my house in Kent, rather than to my mother's house here. I rang my sister twice to confirm whether to get it sent to her house or Mam's, chances of me not remembering to set the delivery address after that seem remote. The order states 'Handed to resident', which seems rather dubious given I'm three hundred miles away, so I'm just hoping it's with one of the neighbours. Not impressed (and my sister is even less impressed).

Recent reading: Ben Aaronovitch's The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London/PC Peter Grant book 6), good, and some major series arc developments, though I still hate what he's done with Lesley May's character arc, which compounds 'being facially disfigured turns you evil', with 'disabled people will betray everything they stand for for the chance of a cure'. I'm probably going to reread the entire series, and have already re-read Rivers of London, but I've run into the Kindle DRM bug with the later books and will have to delete and re-download them. In the meantime I've been reading From Russia With Claws, by "Molly Harper writing as Jacey Conrad and  Gia Corona" (seriously, and is that one author or two?) which has been sitting unread on my Kindle for several years - Russian mafiya werewolves in Seattle, it's practically required research given the overlap with my Graveyard Shift. It's surprisingly good, though the heroine bonking the Rom werewolf alpha at every opportunity doesn't really do anything for me (not that there's anything actually wrong with the writing of the sex scenes, they're just not my thing). Worth a look if you like Supernatural Romance. And I bought myself a couple of Norman Friedman magnum opuses (opi? opii?) to sustain my naval history habit over the holidays. The one I bought on the Kindle (Naval Weapons of WWI) shows signs of being OCRd - badly - from a printout, which given the first edition, from the same publisher, is only seven years old is pretty unforgivable. The one I bought in hardcopy is one of his early works (US Battleships, 1985) and shows he was actually once capable of writing a book without it being a third footnotes. I'm more and more confirmed in my opinion his research is immaculate, but that he desperately needs a better editor, because his sentence-level micro-writing is sloppy as hell.

We did the entertaining visiting relatives thing for lunch: my aunt and uncle (my mother's brother), plus two of the cousins (her sister's kids).

Almost the first thing my cousing Lynn said was "How long is it since I last saw you?" and held out a hand at elbow height. I don't think it's quite that long, I think I saw her at a wedding (possibly hers) when I was in my late teens, but that's still 35 years! Admittedly she has spent most of the intervening time in Australia.

Not quite so long for my cousin Leslie, but certainly a decade, possibly two. And I think only 4 or 5 years for uncle Norman and auntie Jean.

Lovely to see them, but where the hell did all the time go?
 

 Made it up to Durham without too much trouble - the usual 50% hit rate on boarding assistance for the train - one waiting on the wrong platform with the ramp when we pulled into St Pancras, and the help at Kings Cross finally turned up just after they locked the doors. Fortunately the on-train staff stepped in in both cases. I was so ahead of schedule getting to Rochester that I was running an hour and a half of schedule. Of course that didn't help when I was on a fixed train out of King's Cross.

I've spent the last week doing nothing much at all, and enjoying it thoroughly!

Season's Greetings to everyone!