December 2005

yesterday was my last office lunch, just family ones to go now. it was also the first one involving crackers.
i wore my paper crown for an important presentation i was giving in the afternoon and i was pleased to see my boss wore his too.

saturday night was my work christmas lunch at the trocadero centre in london which is a very funny place.

we had a really nice time, mostly because we had one of those evening when you realise lots of your work colleagues could also be classed as ‘friends’ and it was quite easy to involve our spouses in our conversations.

on saturday i took the girls to get a christmas tree. jane told me to try and make it last as long as possible as she was busy making christmas cards.
we saw a sign for christmas trees pointing in to a lawn mower repairing place which seemed like a nice combination, so in we went. things started very well when we came across this ‘no dogs’ sign:

inside we were offered two options – precut trees or a fresh one from the field, so off we went hunting

we identified a likely looking tree (here it is still in the ground)

and then we headed back to get the saw

and then i chopped it down (photo by esther)

here it is felled by my fair hands. what a monster

then we had to put it through the ‘tree netting service’. it was so small (only about 4 foot tall) we needn’t have bothered but we wanted to see how it worked !

when we got it home we had stretchy fun removing the net

and we took iit inside after decorating the base and plopping it in

then yesterday we decorated it:

there was something quite special about going with my daughters to ‘catch us a tree’ in a field. i’ve never done it before but i hope we’ll do it again. we drive by the field we went in quite regularly so we’ll watch out for them growing next year.