Baubles

One victim of the spring clean this year was my red tinsel Christmas tree. It was bought four years ago tomorrow, when Mum and Dad came for the Beige Towers Christmas Experience. For an outlay of perhaps $20, it had served its time well, if not more than a little garishly. 

Reflecting last Saturday in the pub that I'd thrown out the red tinsel tree (also known as the "BCFC Christmas Tree" when you added yellow tinsel to it) and had done nothing about a new one, my friends said "oh, you can borrow our old one if you". So they dropped it off this afternoon on their way back from the dog park (dogs still need walking when it's -15 degrees). On the way home from the pub this morning I went in search of baubles, and in the process scored maximum Yorkshire points for getting them in a 70% off-all-Christmas-decorations sale in the Bay; who needs to buy baubles next week, after all? I'd been having a conversation during the week with L. about baubles; she didn't believe me that such a word existed, but then again, she's never heard the phrase "a spanner in the works" either. Apparently one alternative Canadian phrase is "balls". "Christmas balls"? "Tree balls"? About five orders of magnitude less nice. Much Canadian-English language hilarity is going to ensue, I think.

Still, at least I've now somewhere to put my presents. If Canada Post could actually get them to Beige Towers.....

A Non Running Post

I went to the post office today to collect what I thought would be a parcel that contained a bit of Wembley 2013 Cup Final memorabilia, sent by my recent Beige Towers guests. As I collected it, my first reaction was "this is a very heavy t-shirt". When I got it inside, I found some transatlantic kitchen goods, including a pan from Morrisons (and you can't get more Bradfordian than that). As you can see, the pan on the right was part of the set I bought five-and-a-half years ago when I was thinking "buy a cheap set and throw it away when you leave". Plans change, and so do pans; it'll be nice to be able to eat a meal and not wonder if my rice/pasta/whatever isn't contaminated with tiny slivers of teflon.....