New Years Day 2010

New Years Day was a relaxing day (for most of the time...) with plenty of excellent food served up by Jean followed by what turned out to be a surprisingly contentious game of Scrabble. My 'badger' effort was refused because the 'e' was adjacent to an 'n' to spell 'en', and this was denounced as not being valid*. Later our love of food came to the fore with 'yam', 'loaf' and another of my efforts, 'rosti', which was reluctantly allowed until after I'd won, when it became a bone of contention because it was deemed Italian rather than English. Questa è la vita.

After Scrabble we looked for something else but our attempts at a family game of Cluedo (for ages 8 and above) and even Happy Families (age 3+) on Christmas Day had proved too much of a challenge, so we resorted to good old dominoes. Fortunately this proved to be more like our level, with no major difficulties with the rules, but even so I was still criticised for taking it too seriously (aka trying to win). But maybe this comes from watching some serious gamblers in the snooker club 25 years ago who would regularly play (even back then) for £1 a spot. In our first game today I'd ended up holding nearly 50, so its a good job we didn't play for similar stakes! Of course all this acrimony was only in jest (though I wasn't convinced when Carole up-ended the scrabble board at the end of the game!).

Earlier we'd handed a belated Christmas present to Mum & Dad which had taken longer to be delivered than I'd expected. It was a photobook of pictures from our holiday in Wales back in September and was a lovely surprise for them. They often look at the pictures on the computer, so this will be a great way to remember what was a fantastic week.

* If you're wondering about the word 'en', then it's actually a unit of measurement used in the printing industry, equal to half an 'em' (taken from the letter M). Of course I'd like to say I knew that before, but I can't. But I will remember it next time!