It occurred to me too late that the collision between Chinese New Year, Burns Night, and Australia Day might have been used as an excuse for some Sino-Australian haggis-appreciation evening. As it was I had a shopping list Jeremy wrote while in a morphine daze, including a few things I didn't manage to find, such as 'tiny haggises' and 'swarm of jellyfish'. Nobody seemed to mind too much.

Australia day, like Burns Night has traditional dress (blue singlets rather than kilts), traditional tipple (lager in units called stubbies rather than whisky in units called drams), and traditional food (singed sausages rather than broiled haggis). We substituted sensible winter clothing, Australian wines, and sausages pan-fried or grilled on the stove (having learned in previous years that actually trying to run a barbecue in an English winter is a mug's game).

As is often the case with barbecues, the generosity of my guests meant I had a near-infinite amount of leftover bread and sausages, not to mention a pie and some prawns I forgot to take out of the fridge. I took a selection of the leftover food up the hill to cleanskies's new gaff so she can consume them during her convalescence. She's still recovering from the triple whammy of the accident, the surgery, and the painkillers, but is doing better than yesterday.

Yay! The cherry tree picnic worked. We had an afternoon being entertained by shrieking toddlers running around in the garden and playing in Jeremy’s rainbow hammock, picnic food under the tree (or at least next to the tree, which is not very wide). We had lots to eat, about fifty per cent of it being cherry cake or black forest gateau party cake. There was enough rain to give us an excuse to get the umbrellas out ☂, but not so much that anyone felt the need to retreat indoors.

As evening drew in and the children went home, we got out some olives and other non-child-friendly snacks and turned the fairly lights on in the greenhouse for the first time this year. Conversation turned to grown-up topics like lesbianism, motorcycle design, and the philosophical underpinnings of the mortgage market.

All in all I think everybody had a fun time—even if a few people complained that the cucumber sandwiches hadn’t had their crusts cut off. I think it just makes them healthier ☺. Maybe next time. (I discovered I prefer Co-Op white bread to Hovis Guaranteed Square bread because Hovis Guaranteed Square bread is not square.)

Click the pictures to see more pictures of people picnicking and contemplating the very pretty cherry tree.

Spent Saturday rejigging the style sheets for the Caption web site, the Caption Timewarp page, and a page with some photos of Steve Whitaker at Caption. Strange thing is, as time goes by I use less and less CSS.

Saturday night we congregated at Jo and Alex’s for Jo’s birthday cocktail party. Jo’s old obsession is cocktail dresses and her new obsession is the video game Guitar Hero so we ended up with a lot of our heroic guitaristas rocking out while dressed to the nines under a tiny mirror ball. Neatly also solves the problem of what music to play at your cocktail party.

After Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Christmas Recovery parties with lots of our friends, Jeremy and Dan and I went to the Zodiac’s New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the new calendar with a few undred random strangers. This is the first time I’ve been in a public New Year’s party, and it was great fun.

We bow; we've finished
Originally uploaded by Wilden.

Upstairs was Your Song (where local bands do silly covers). The picture shows about half of the Evenings, who managed to fill up the upstairs stage by dint of recruiting practically everybody who’d ever played in the Evenings in the past or indeed the future, all in black tie. So many guitars! A difficult act to follow, you’d think, but Smilex responded brilliantly by turning up in full-on KISS make-up and costume, complete with glitterball codpiece. Awesome! And then the countdown to midnight, live from the BBC. We even had the obligatory shower of confetti. The balloons came later, after someone had turned up with a stick long enough to poke the balloon net with.

We have spent the last couple of days mainly lounging around the house, watching Ranma ½ and working out ways to convert surplus party snacks in to food.