Last night, on leaving the office, (as opposed to driving to it) the road outside was blocked by a vast lorry.

Looking around a little there was a thin man with bad hair and teeth and a stripey jumper thrusting an envelope under the nose of anyone who’d listen.

I let myself be accosted. He was looking for an address.  When I saw that the ‘sender’ column was in Germany, I jokingly asked if he’d driven from there. He had!  So I switched to German.

It didn’t go quite as well as the last time I tried, or the time before but we did still manage to communicate.  He’d made it as far as Chesterfield with no map of England whatsoever, but once he’d got here he had no chance of finding the address he was looking for at all.

In the circs, I didn’t mind going back into the office and looking up the address for him.

He told me his next stop was Austria!

Yesterday, I was in blissful ignorance as to what Molton Brown could be.  Then it was requested as a Christmas present and I have today been on a voyage of discovery.

First, I found it was unctions of various different flavours.

Later this afternoon, I ascertained that it cannot be procured in Boots, and finally got around to googling it.

It’s unctions that have their own boutiques or outlets in the high end department stores like John Lewis and House of Fraser.

Nottingham is one of the fortunate few towns to qualify for its own boutique, and it happens to be around the corner from the Council House, so around the corner I duly went.

It’s one of those stores that has largely empty shelves, with a few delicately placed, uplit bottles stategically surrounded by expensive-looking wood.  There are price tags, but you have to hunt.

Some of their range includes hand wash and moisturizer perfumed with unpronounceable and unheard of botanicals.  And if you’ve ever been to Lib Dem conference, they’ll be familiar.  I’m pretty sure that the bottles of fancy handwash in the gents of the Hilton Brighton Metropole are Molton Brown.

Presumably, they don’t pay the £14 a bottle the Nottingham store fleeced me for.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that money buys you something.  But not sodium stearate in a bottle.

Whilst I was queueing to hand over my cash, I was struck by the quality of the staff.  In particular the blond man with the biceps, the expensive hair do and the nose – which could only be described as ‘aqualine.’ Long, pointy, delicate.

Then my focus widened.  The other staff members, all women, had exactly the same nose. I was on the verge of asking if they were related, because their faces were similar, but then it occured to me that good bone structure is probably a job requirement for working there.

They were excessively curteous, boxed my purchases, apologised profusely for the delay (one of their tills was out of action).  They’d clearly had a rough day selling fancy soap to posh people and explaining what naran ji is.  (“distilled from the delicate white blossoms of Moroccan orange trees”)

I asked them how long the store had been open, and they told me nearly two years.  That’s two years where I’ve walked past it a couple of times a week and never spotted it once.  It’s a prime location just off Bridlesmithgate, which has some of the poshest shops in the City.

My two bottles of lotion were wrapped, boxed, and tied up with ribbon.  Then that box was put into a heavy paper bag with fancy handles and tied up with another ribbon.  Which leads to a further dilemma – how much of what I carried out of the store do I give as a gift?  Does it come out of the bag?  I clearly paid for that as well, so does it count as part of the present?  Do I wrap the whole lot and leave it as layers so that the recipient can unwrap it very slowly?  – it cost so much they’re not getting anything else!

I thought EBU just did Eurovision, and that was that, but yesterday, driving to Chesterfield for an evening session, I was forced onto Radio 3 by “Poetry? Puhlease!” on Radio 4 and heard a wonderful concert from the BBC Singers.

There were a number of unaccompanied carols, all of them the sorts of things that even good choirs struggle to stay in tune for.

The theme was English and French carols, and many of them were in French, sung with good French accents too. Well done, BBC Singers.

The session ended up with a glorious, chaotic arrangement of Ding Dong Merrily on High with the Glorias going all over the place and changing key randomly.

The EBU link? This was apparently part of the annual EBU Day of Christmas Music – a 7 hour long marathon of concerts from Moscow, Karlsruhe (Nottingham’s twin town), Québécois Laval (? European?) and Chrudim in the Czech Republic, as well as the London concert.

It’s available on the BBC’s “Listen Again” under the link above – but only as one link for the whole 7 hours!

This year’s round robin is unusually terse. But I’ve got to get these cards in the post!

Here’s a downloadable copy for those of you not on my Christmas card list!

The Flickr links for the photos are: Windsor Cat Snow House “We Want to Go Out!” and Garden from Upstairs Window

We bought a house we moved into last Christmas. The renovations continue. New kitchen going in right now!

House has a big, odd-shaped, established garden – we haven’t quite got on top of maintaining it fully yet.

Smudge (l) and Fudge joined our household in May, and have been reasonably well behaved since.

This is the best pic I’ve taken this year. It’s one of the cats living in Windsor Castle, where I spent my hols singing.

Why not blog four pictures that tell the story of your year?

There’s a new Flickr group for the Ratcliffe on Soar power station – hundreds of photos of a coal-fired electricity generating plant in south Nottinghamshire.
The first I saw of the group, I thought it was a bit odd.  But then it can be seen for miles around, and it is very striking from a distance.  You can certainly see it from the top public floor of the Cornerhouse in the centre of Nottingham, on a clear day.

It used to be a personal milestone for me when my parents were driving me back to university at the end of holidays – I new when we saw the cooling towers from the M1, that our journey was nearly at an end.

And another power-station-factoid – some might argue that all those tall cooling towers are a phenomenal waste of valuable energy.  After burning all the coal to boil water into steam to turn turbines which turn magnets in coils to generate electricity for thousands of homes, the steam is cooled down again in those vast concrete towers.

I have read that rather than force-cooling the steam down, an infrastructure could be created to pipe the steam away for better use – eg heating houses or plants.  I have read the steam can be piped up to 30 miles away.  That’s easily enough to get from Ratcliffe to anywhere in Nottingham city.  There are also plenty of homes and businesses much closer to the power station that need heating.
Another power-station fact.  They store coal in huge great open-air piles near the entrance to the station.  You can see them from the road.  If the coal is carelessly stored, if, for example, you make the pile too deep, it can burst into flames.