(Written 15th January 2010, post-dated 27th December 2009)

Our family is not like other families.  Most children abhor the idea of spending time with their parents, let alone uncles and aunties they hardly ever see, and anything family-related at Christmas time is definitely out.  Not in our family.  Every year (if we can) we all meet up shortly after Christmas for “Draisey Day”.  We usually descent on my uncle and auntie’s house in Woking, spending the whole day eating, playing silly games, playing music, and generally catching up on the past year or so.  And it’s one of the highlights of my year.

This year was no exception, not least because we brought with us a portable people-magnet – a little baby boy.  More than that, Samuel is the first of the new generation, which makes him even more significant.  I’m pleased to report that he lived up to the hype, and thrilled everyone the whole time we were there.  He was passed from person to person, he fed when he had the opportunity, he slept very little, and he kept everyone amused without doing a single thing.  What a gift it is to be a baby.  Shame he’s too young to realise it.

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Here’s a confession – I’ve not been blogging as much recently as I should have been.  The reason?  Twitter.

I use my blog to tell people what I’ve been doing recently.  My readers are usually friends and family, unless a passer-by happens to stumble across something via Google that interests them.  My posts are generally about things I’m interested in, things I’ve done, things I meant to do but didn’t, or things that I want to rant about.

But now I’ve fallen in love with Twitter, my Twhirl client always running on my desktop, ready to accept my latest status update as and when I feel led to bend the world’s ear with my 140 characters of insight.  No logging in, no pressure to write unnecessary paragraphs of fluff, just a short blast of information.  No time like the present.  The result is that I feel like I’ve told the world what’s going on, despite the noticeable absence on my blog.  So I apologise that I’ve not posted more here in recent weeks.  Blame Twitter for being so darn addictive.

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Yesterday I felt like listening to some Christmas music, and had a hazy memory of having a CD of the All Souls Orchestra somewhere.  I had a flick through my CD folder but couldn’t find it, and then remembered that I’d looked for it last year and found it to be broken – CDs, it appears, are not 100% bullet-proof after all, and this one had decided that the silvery backing wanted to peel off, rendering it well and truly dead.  So, that CD had ended up in the bin about this time last year.  So long All Souls Orchestra.

At least, that was until I noticed I had a backup CD in my folder that I had created way back in 2002, on which I had crammed 9 music albums, some of them 2-disc albums, in MP3 format.  Lo and behold, there was the All Souls Orchestra album!  So I got to listen to the Christmas music after all.

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