altariel | Holiday and life update

A fantastic Christmas and New Year, courtesy of our good and generous friends K&J, who let us stay for ten days and waited on us hand and foot throughout.

The festive season in fact started on the 20th, when I zipped down to Our Nation's Capital to meet

gair and Gerald. We went to see Much Ado About Nothing, with Tamsin Greig and Joseph Millson as Beatrice and Benedick. 1950s Cuban setting, very well done: made the romcom very sexy, but there was an undercurrent of violence and nutsy Catholicism that made Hero's alleged promiscuity very dramatic. (Joseph Millson turned up later in the holiday as the dad in the joy-making Sarah Jane Adventures.)

mraltariel and I scooted down to London on the 23rd, where we were insanely pampered by our hosts and settled down to a strict regime of ten days of steady eating and drinking, the centrepiece of which was a whopping great goose. Obviously we needed to do some pretty lively activity to work this all off: board games, film-watching, reading. The Christmas Doctor Who was thoroughly enjoyable but I thought didn't quite have the pizazz of last year's; Dracula: WTF?!; thing I liked most was The Ruby in the Smoke (I gather they're at least making the next one in the series, and I'm looking forward to that). I cheerfully slept through The Brothers Grimm and a fair old chunk of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. (Bit of a pirate theme to the holiday, actually, what with PotC, an addictive pirate-themed card game called Loot, and then - of course, Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter's Cove (which gave PotC a run for its money, mostly by not having twenty minutes of pointless mucking about on a island with ~~Ewoks~~ surely post-colonially dodgy 'natives' and just getting down to the promised bloodletting).

Particular book gift triumphs from K&J included two more Phryne Fisher novels which were promptly passed around all four of us, and a Tove Jansson haul, including the first volume of reprints of her Moomin comic strip, and a collection of her short stories, A Winter Book. Awe-inspiring.

We'd planned to come home on the 27th, but some plans at this end got changed at the last minute, and we ended up eating K&J out of house and home until New Year's Day. We took advantage of the extra time and being in London to see The History Boys, which I'd missed in both its previous run and in the film version. Stephen Moore was excellent; Isla Blair too. I liked it a great deal, although the career trajectory of the TV historian was fairly implausible, and I don't think that bit of plot worked terribly well.

New Year's Eve was spent very happily at I&A's in Wood Green: we were stuffed to gills with more food and saw the New Year in with the excellent dice game Perudo. Also that evening I was given - and this has to be in the running for BEST PRESENT EVER - a DVD of my favourite film, A Matter of Life and Death, signed (to me!) by its photographer and master of his art, cinematographer Jack Cardiff. I'm a bit starstruck by it.

Getting back to Wood Green from Shepherd's Bush on New Year's Eve was complete madness and took the best part of 2 1/2 hours: the Piccadilly line got closed because of a massive fight at Caledonian Road. So the early hours of 2007 were spent hunkered under a bridge at Finsbury Park waiting for the night bus.

Gentle trip back to Cambridge the next day, and I've mostly spent this week sifting through the email backlog and trying to get back into the swing of work, although of course the absolutely most pressing task when I got back was to catch up on Strictly Come Dancing, the result of which I'd managed to avoid entirely over the holiday (tho' it was pretty predictable once Emma Bunton had been OUTRAGEOUSLY voted out at the semi-final stage). Stupid British public, they did the same thing with John Barrowman in that ice-dancing thing. Speaking of whom, the penultimate episode of Torchwood was a corker and, as well as the generally upward trend in the quality of the show (apart from the Fight Club one - gag), makes me optimistic for the next season. (The last episode was a bit: "Oh no, not the end of the world AGAIN..." though.)

We went to see The Holiday last night: romantic comedy drama about a house swap with Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, and Jack Black. The first half hour was pretty ghastly, particularly the tin-eared dialogue for the English characters and the fantasy English setting, but it got an awful lot better as it went on, particularly the L.A. storyline involving Winslet, Black, and an elderly screenwriter that Winslet befriends. Also Jude Law doing 'Mr Napkinhead' was worth the price of the ticket. I'll probably round off the festive season with a viewing of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe at some point over the weekend.

So - 2007. The Big Change for next year is that we are going to be spending a fair old chunk of it over in the US courtesy of

mraltariel's job. We'll be in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area from the middle of March to some time in September, so anyone who knows that region or has any thoughts on packing up and moving abroad for a bit, speak your piece. I'm hugely excited about the whole thing.