Week 145: Christmas

Monday 27 December 2021

• You know how every year there’s a news story about families being disgusted by a disappointing “winter wonderland” in a muddy field somewhere. This time, there was one in the car park here. Not in the usual muddy field, at least – it’s a proper surface, and even puddle-free since the noisy installation of drainage in the summer – and no foulmouthed chain-smoking Father Christmas impersonator either. But everything else you’d expect: gormless reindeer in a pen, forlorn undecorated Christmas trees, and a plastic pretend ice skating rink. “Children, whose parents had paid through the nose for the experience, shuffled about on the floor in their skates. They couldn’t even glide.”

  And most of all, live music, well within earshot of me, penetrating the double glazing, which was OK I suppose, mustn’t grumble about some free entertainment. They had a sort of pound shop Bing Crosby, who was quite good, and another performer who didn’t appear to know any Christmas songs, which was refreshing.

• We had an unusually normal and quite nice Christmas thank you.

• Slightly disappointed by the state of bus data during this period when there’s a greater than usual need to check whether, and how frequently, buses are running – too much timetable data was not quite right. Too late on Boxing Day, I realised that maybe some of missing timetables on bustimes.org, for some of the few buses running on Christmas and Boxing Days, were actually my fault – there might have been a little mistake in my code, how embarrassing. But I was quick to leap out from the residual heat of the electric blanket and back downstairs to fix it.

  Nice to see folks sharing visualisations. The Christmas Eve bus I rode towards the parental home mysteriously ceased tracking just before I boarded it, but I think was just cosmic rays affecting the satellite/ticket machine hardware.

• I’m too tired to detail all the interesting food and culture (Dundee cake, Die Hard) I consumed so I won’t.