I would ask......

....... when will our weekends, or indeed lives, be normal again. Somehow I suspect any answer I did get wouldn't really help though.

We started off OK. Last night (well, strictly Friday night, but I've not been to bed yet, even though it's now Sunday) Chris had her work Christmas meal at Hollywells in Oxford.I collected her around 10.45pm and on the way back home, managed to hit a deer. Our car did not do well from the encounter.

Tonight we went to someone's 40th birthday party. I must be getting old, as the volume seriously affected my hearing. Well that's not strictly true - nothing to do with age and everything to do with a poorly set up sound system that had too punchy a bass (you could feel your chest move) and inadequate mid-range reproduction.

What was odd? All the attractive women, with the exception of Nikita, were over 35, while almost all those under 35 showed signs of having over-enjoyed the produce of messers Burger king, Macdonald et al.

That's not so unusual: what else? The band played a bunch of Ska/Madness stuff, like 'Baggy Trousers', 'Night boat to Cairo', Poison Ivy', 'Ghost town' etc. The people trying to dance looked like they must have been seriously stoned and trying to impersonate Morrisey from his 'Smiths' days, standing on one leg, arms waving randomly with an expression of moderate confusion on their faces. Certainly some of them were old enough to remember how things should have been done.

So we came home, eventually, because Chris is having tummy pains and has now gone to bed. Nikita came back too, as she wasn't sleepy, and she + Ben were going to watch a DVD together. I'm not quite ready for bed either, so I'm here blogging, and when I've finished I'll watch the second half of 'Flash Gordon'. The film is a classic for it's send up of the original and because the acting is appalling, it's more funny than it would have been otherwise. And people still quote lines like "Send out war-rocket Ajax to bring back his body" to each other, so it MUST be a classic.

TTFN.