'I think we are in for a long hard winter....'

I hear the council are finally going to splash out and change the Christmas lights they have hung up and been hanging onto for the past fifty years at least which were beginning to depress me after seven. The putting up of said lights always involves an over zealous police man with a whistle. The first time I saw this I thought something terrible had happened.

Strolling along the streets of this 'city' I found myself doing that thing again. You know, saying stuff that wouldn't look out of place if my dad were walking alongside. ' And they say there's no money about' would be the remark as the town spills out from every bar despite the cold and crisis. It's still tapas week or tapa depending on how much money you have, and it's not stopping everyone from spinning around in their Barbour jackets while stocking up at the local perfumeria and cooing over their well heeled children and debating which bar to go to next. It amazes me the fervour this festival attracts. The bar owners are beside themselves as they were expecting a low turn out with all the doom and gloom around. I got a text from Steffers and we are to meet in the Tomate Jamon early tomorrow to bag a table and hopefully have lunch with some mode of decorum. Strategies are needed when it comes to food and I still haven't quite mastered it.

In the last week I have been asked by three people for money which is quite common as Christmas looms. Henderson gave me a ticking off for giving a man he described as a junkie the euro from my shopping trolley which the man begged me to give him. I've never really known exactly how I feel about the argument that you are only encouraging people to drink more or take drugs but who knows what they have been through and I don't think we should be heartless to the penniless. Earlier I had seen a boy and girl sitting on the pavement smoking and trying to play the bongos and it reminded me of a time long ago when I would be found in a similar plight not minding the smoking bit or the boy bit even, but detesting the bongo part. I am convinced this bongo playing plague started not in the sixties or Africa but in a club in Soho in the nineties called Violets which was named after Ronnie and Reggie Kray's mum. A club that looked like a scene from Tony Hancock's The Rebel crossed with What's New Pussycat.It wasn't a club to be taken seriously and was a bit of a laugh really but it inadvertently spawned the desire to make noise for the sake of it by thousands of young men all over Europe.

I have a terrible affliction, well, many, among them Spoonersim ( dyslexia as well it seems ) but the latest development seems to be an inability to coordinate the names of the television programmes as Henderson whizzes through them to see what's on that particular night. This is how I came up with the Muslims Do The Funniest Things but today it was for a moment that I thought Gary Linekar was The Devil's Whore. This also happens when I am scanning the headlines of the newspapers via the Internet and today it was Gordon Brown and The Skull of Doom. In the supermarket I was sure I had seen a product called Porn Copper but it seems too obvious. It would be easy to blame the drink but I am afraid it has always been like this and shows no sign of getting better.