The machines are listening

Earlier this month I had a long conversation with my friend Gawain. We met online as we both collect baseball cards and occasionally we have chats about the sport, collecting cards and the state of the world. During the conversation I showed Gawain the Lego minifigure that another friend, Connor gave me last year.

It's a customised printed figure wearing a retro San Diego Padres uniform. Connor designed it using a machine at a Lego Discovery Centre. Gawain and I discussed how if someone started printing these off there would probably be a decent collector's market for them. He also listened to me patiently talking some more about Lego and how it is increasingly geared towards adult collectors. 

We were chatting on the Messenger app, which is part of Meta, the same company as Facebook and WhatsApp. The next day he sent me these screen grabs for adverts that appeared on his Facebook feed.

We weren't typing messages to each other. We were talking. And the machines were listening. I get ads related to Lego on my Facebook feed all the time, which I always assumed was down to the groups I'm in. But some intelligent system recognised Gawain talking about Lego and offered him some highly specialised services in those ads - the kind of ads that would be of interest to people who are collecting Lego to invest or are thinking of printing designs on minifigures. 

My most popular blog post of 2022 was about how I realised an app I use to track going to football matches was shaping my choices through gamification. Seeing a conversation with a friend turned into marketing algorithms by eavesdropping machines seems another step towards the hybrid interconnected world that Douglas Coupland keeps writing about. 

Weirdly I was reading a book called The Age of Earthquakes that Douglas Coupland contributed to around the same time as all this happened and this page stood out. It feels like this happened to me!

I know the irony of feeding the online accumulation of a digital version of me (my cloudganger) by blogging all this. The machines will be able to connect the digital dots - if they are truly intelligent then over the next couple of days my social media feeds will be full of reassuring content about how the machines are benign and their intentions are pure. 

In addition to this blog, I write in an old fashioned analog journal most days. Now I'm starting to think a good reason to keep doing that is so some thoughts stay out of reach of the machines.

August 2022 - squeezing the most out of summer

August was a very full month. I've already blogged about our week on holiday in Shropshire and our trip to the Shrewsbury Flower Show. It was also a 'decamonth' of football matches and I had time to see some model trains as well. 

The Cardiff Model Railway Exhibition was on the weekend after we got back from our week in the Shire. It was held in the ice rink around the corner from our house. There were an array of impressive model railway layouts and other stands there. As is usually the case with model railway exhibitions, there was a mix of detailed attempts to recreate real life in miniature, along with more whimsical 'fun' layouts.

However my favourite trains were the miniature live steam engines that were just running around a simple circle at the back of the room. There was a clever use of foreshortened scenery to make it look interesting, and something for the kids as well!

Speaking of 'for the kids', the new series of Bluey is now on Disney Plus. Cathy and I have got really into this lovely cartoon show. She went into town one day and brought me back a present.

(I posted this on Facebook in a group about Bluey and got hundred of likes and comments from other grown ups all saying "WHERE CAN I GET THIS?!?")

As I mentioned, on the football front, August was a 'Decamonth'. I went to ten games. I also had a small article published in When Saturday Comes. It's the September issue and will still be in the shops if you want to go and read it.

The article provoked some discussion among Barry Town fans as to whether that was the right shirt or the player named in the article. I did explain that the image choice was an editorial decision!

My footballing adventures began right at the start of August with a trip to the Port Talbot sea-side to watch Afan Lido v Barry Town. The ground is so close to the beach there were little piles of windblown sand in almost every nook and corner. 

The Barry goalkeeper didn't have much to do as Barry won 4-1 to get their first points in the JD Cymru South this season. 

I also saw my first ever 4-4 draw, at Cardiff Draconians v Brecon Corries in the second qualifying round of the Welsh Cup. The Dracs were winning 4-2 with only a few minutes to go, then conceded two goals. There was no extra time - it went straight to penalties. Almost inevitably, the Dracs lost the penalty shootout 8-9. It was very disappointing for them. 

I went to two Shrewsbury Town games during our week in Shropshire, and added a third before the end of the month. On Bank Holiday Saturday I drove to Bristol and met Ken, a family friend who lives in Bristol, for Shrewsbury's game at Bristol Rovers.

Ken is a season ticket holder at Aston Villa but he didn't mind slumming it with me in League One for the day. It was the first time I'd been to watch Shrewsbury play at the Memorial Ground since leap day in 2020. It's an easy away day for me, and this was the fifth time I'd been to a game there since 2017. It was also the tenth time I've seen Bristol Rovers, so when I checked in on Futbology I got a badge.

I also went to my first two Grange Albion games of the season, sadly both defeats. The second game was on Bank Holiday Monday at the ostentatiously named Ocean Park Arena.

Albion were playing Clwb Cymric, a Welsh-speaking team who have been on the rise recently. This game was the last one on the South Wales Groundhop, which meant there was a programme available. It's the first Grange Albion game I've been to with a programme!

I acquired a few baseball cards in the course of the month, including a set that arrived in a tube! 

I will be blogging about them on my baseball card blog sometime soon.

And as a final photo from the month - here's one from the honey tent at the Shrewsbury Flower Show. I don't know why I didn't include this in my round up, because it really amused me. 

Numbers can be playful (the "Twosday" post)

It’s “Twosday” – the Tuesday of all the twos. The 22nd of February 2022, which can be written as 22.2.22. It can also be written as the palindrome 22. 02.2022. It even works if you write it the American way as 2.22.22.

If I had more wherewithal about me I would have posted this at 2.22pm. But sometimes work gets in the way of fun like blogging about weird numbers.

I do like playful numbers, though, and I like playing with numbers. That’s partly why I have done a Christmas Card Audit every year, or keep tabs on the amount of leaflets we receive at election times. Last week I went to see my doctor to discuss my flowmeter readings that I’m doing daily to analyse my lung function. The doctor asked if I minded doing another two weeks’ worth of readings. I said I didn’t mind at all. I love collecting data.

I realise this is an unusual trait – cataloguing mundane things in life. Cathy and I have a little notebook we use to keep score whenever we play Yahtzee. Over the past 10 years we have recorded hundreds of games in there. We have different tactical approaches to playing Yahtzee and one day I plan to analyse the data to see if there is any advantage to one strategy over another. I doubt there will be much of a difference at the end of the data trail.

I know other people share this focus. The aforementioned Christmas Card Audits are easily the posts on my blog that people engage with the most. I sometimes blog about my football stats – there is a whole app dedicated to supporting people like me who like to record which football matches they attend. And I have my own supplementary data projects too, like my ongoing ‘Book of Days’ project.

The obsession with numbers is part of the reason I really like baseball too. The baseball cards that I collect are full of statistics and I admire the way different designers attempt to spice up the data and display it a bit differently. And sometimes the cards trigger other number-related connections as well. Two new cards arrived in the post today, all the way from Rhode Island in the USA. That brace increased my total of cards featuring Tony Gwynn to a significant number that triggered instant recognition – 1066!

All I need to do now is make a reference to conquering my collecting goals and this blog post is complete!

Talking about stamps... and baseball cards... again

I sort of still collect stamps, although it's not something I'm doing as actively as in the past. Last year, the society I belong to, the British Thematic Association, started doing meetings on Zoom. I presented about my collection back in March 2021.

The Zoom meetings are recorded, so if you would like to hear me talking about my collection of stamps featuring the Statue of Liberty, you can watch it here:

Since then I was asked to present again (virtually) at the Newport Philatelic Society back in November, and in March I'm due to present to the Caledonian Philatelic Society based in Glasgow.

I haven't added anything really to my collection for ages, except for a few things I inherited from my dad's collection as Cathy and I have been sorting through it. My collecting focus has switched to baseball cards, specifically cards featuring Tony Gwynn, the all-time greatest player for the San Diego Padres. I closed out 2021 on 1,052 different cards featuring Tony. One week into 2022 and I had a nice mail day when two envelopes arrived containing 3 new cards for the collection.

The card on the handwritten note came from Nashville and is from a set released in 1999. The others were from a collector in the UK and were released last year. My blog about baseball cards is currently on a midwinter break, but these cards will be featured on there some time this year!

Reflecting on 2021 - blogging renaissance

It may be a bit early to start reviews of the year just before Christmas, but I've been thinking a lot about the year as it comes to an end. This first 'reflections' post is a bit self-indulgent.

I blogged more posts on this blog in 2021 than for the previous nine years. In fact, almost as many as I blogged way back in 2011. Over the years I have posted quite a bit about the decline of blogging. But this year I have tried to use my blog as a way of just keeping track of things with at least a review of the previous month's happenings. 

The blog mascots - The Panperth Hogs

I'm not one to blog much about current events, with the exception of elections where I do my now customary analysis of election leaflets. This year I have also posted a "Snack of the Month" every month. I've enjoyed having a monthly thing to blog about. I might try to blog a different monthly thing next year.

I have also been blogging about baseball cards, with well over 200 blog posts published on my blog about cards featuring Tony Gwynn. I have now written about 900 baseball cards. There are still more yet to be blogged! So with the baseball card blog and this blog, that is over 300 blog posts this year; almost one blog post every day!

That's a lot of material to inform my cloud-ganger as that version of me coalesces. (If you don't know what I mean, then this might help, and this as well.)

This output hasn't really been balanced with input. I have barely read any books this year. I don't feel any poorer for it, although I feel guilty about not reading more. The piles of half-read books and unread books look at me reproachfully as I sit scrolling on my phone or absorbing sporting spectacle on the TV. Maybe when we can restart our book group meetings in person, I will get kickstarted into reading more. Until then, maybe the imbalance between content creation and content consumption will continue. 

Analog collector in an increasingly digital collecting world

Earlier this year, Topps, the company that currently has the sole license to produce official Major League Baseball cards, launched NFT trading cards. These are "virtual" uncopyable images that can be transferred a bit like cryptocurrency. There's all sorts of lingo that goes along with this like "blockchain" and so on. Digi wonks go nuts for this sort of thing.

This has made me realise that I am an analog boy at heart because I have zero interest in this. To me, it has as much appeal as collecting "baseball cards" by right-clicking save on a Google image search.

Topps apparently get 20% of any sell on fees so every time this gets sold on they get a cut. I can see the appeal although people sell them on eBay to circumvent the official system and avoid the fees. A card can change hands multiple times during its lifetime. The idea that every time it's sold on the manufacturer get a percent cut is a corporate executive's dream.

On the same day that Topps launched their digital cards, a packet of real baseball cards arrived in the post. I'd bought them off eBay and really enjoyed looking through them. I appreciate the tactile feel of cards 'in hand', feeling the different kinds of cardboard, the different finishes, spotting blemishes and imperfections.

I even don't mind cards that have been "loved" and have slightly worn edges and corners. Those cards have a history to them. They have character. I try to take good care of my cards, but I have added a bit of "character" to some of them, myself. 

The digital replacement movement is pernicious. This month I have been going to a lot of football matches (going while I can - who knows if another lockdown is coming!) and on three occasions the clubs have offered a virtual programme instead of a printed one. It's not the same thing. 

A printed programme is a tangible souvenir of an event - a record that something happened that acts a reminder when you see it. A PDF on a hard drive is a poor, ersatz alternative. You can't idly flick through it while waiting for the kettle to boil. 

(I was very pleased when I watched a game at Pontypridd Town this week to discover the club have reverted from virtual to physical programmes!)

I feel okay about realising I'm an analog collector. That's just me being me. Although it does mean I need to find room for all the stuff I acquire!

July 2021 - End of month review

July started with us coming back from a week's holiday on the Lleyn Peninsular in North Wales (see blog posts here), and ended with us on holiday in Shropshire with family from Salop and from Edinburgh. 

There's a cheetah in this card game!

Inbetween these times away, we squeezed in quite a bit.

I came back from our North Wales holiday with a sore throat and sneezing more than usual. Apparently that can be a sign of coronavirus infection in people who have been double-jabbed, so Cathy and I booked appointments at the drive-through test centre at the Cardiff City Stadium. I now feel I have lived the full pandemic experience, now that I have had to stick a swab up my nose! 

Our tests were negative. I was impressed with the organisation of the test centre. Everyone there really knew the drill. They knew we were coming, and processed us through very politely and quickly. We had the results texted to us in less than 24 hours. It was a good experience in a stressful moment.

We also watched the European Championships semi-finals and final. England blew it, is my verdict, with a terrible penalty shoot-out in the final that will potentially have scarred another generation of kids. I mentioned last month how this was the first international championship I have experienced since my Dad died, and after the final I have thought several times about how he would have rung me up to dissect the failure in detail. These are the unexpected moments when grief catches us.

In my other blogging project, I reached a new milstone - 700 baseball cards featuring Tony Gwynn. I feel I am starting to run out of steam a bit with the baseball cards and my blogging has been very gappy of late as the supply of new cards has run out.

It might continue to be gappy, as I have started going to football matches again. I've blogged about my trips to Bristol and Aberdare. I added a third match in the month of July as The New Saints were playing Kauna Zalgiris from Lithuania in a Europa Conference League Qualifying game during our week in Shropshire. As TNS play in Oswestry, just half an hour away, I went with my brother for a fun evening out.

TNS already had a 5-0 lead from the first leg in Lithuania, so I was hopeful we would see some goals. And we did. 

It was a very one-sided affair. Kauno Zalgiris played suicide football, trying to build from the back and repeatedly giving the ball away as TNS played a high press. Several moves broke down in their own half and resulted in TNS having chance after chance to score. There was a Lithuanian guy in front of us and his partner started laughing as me and my brother started shouting 'Nooooo!' as the Kauno defenders set up for another futile attempt to play out from the back. It was cringeworthy to watch. 

TNS won 5-1 on the night, with some superb goals, to cap a 10-1 aggregate win over the two legs.

Spending a week with family also meant there were opportunities for back garden football with an array of smaller people. My eldest nephew is getting pretty good these days - he graduated from his soccer course with three trophies a couple of weeks back. He also hits the ball harder than he used to and his Dad has had to reinforce the back fence, as you can see in this photo!

I will do a summary of our week in Shropshire in a future blog post, although our big days out were actually in Cheshire and Wales, so it will be photos from not-Shropshire in the main.

May 2021 End of Month review

Yes, it's my monthly review of the month just gone, which serves as a both an online journal and an announcement that I'm still alive. The pandemic seems to have abated somewhat and places are opening up. However, attending a football match is still off-limits in Wales (unless your team plays in the English system) so I wasn't able to go to Barry Town's final game of the season - the post-season play-off for a Europa League qualifying place.

This actually marked the first time where I really disagreed with the restrictions. 150 people were allowed in the Barry Town clubhouse to watch the game live on TV, but none of them were allowed to go outside and stand on the terraces to watch the game. I have been supportive of the rules restricting movement throughout the pandemic, but this just felt arbitrary and stupid. 

But anyway, that's enough about what I didn't do in May. What about the things I did do? Well, the month kicked off with an election. Here we are outside our local gorsaf bleidleisio, having voted. 

The election returned more than expected Labour Senedd Members, with enough to form a workable government. I blogged about the result here. There was a shift away from the more reactionary right wing parties, which either indicates a decline in popularity for that sort of politics, or that the Conservative Party has regained the support from that wing of society. (I think it's more the latter.) 

One additional aspect to the new Government is that there was a reshuffle in the cabinet and we have a new health minister. It's not yet apparent whether that will mean any changes in health policy, or knock-on effects for the NHS, but at least it means that things that have been on hiatus for ages can progress now. 

We also made the most of easing travel restrictions to visit family, including timing a visit to Shrewsbury to see my sister and family for the first time since Christmas 2019. My twin niece and nephew were 6 on the day we saw them - we hadn't seen them the entirety of the year they were 5!

Due to the changeable weather we had to shelter under some gazebos, but at least that meant we got a pic!

I also showed off some of me back garden football skillz in true 'cool uncle' style. 

No children were harmed in the displaying
of these skillz

The second time we went up, we actually stayed the night. It was the weekend when it would have been my dad's birthday on the Sunday. It was nice to be with mum and the rest of the family for most of that day. We also had a little walk out to a nearby pool, where we saw a gazillion tadpoles.

I have almost stopped reading anything during the pandemic, but I did finish one book in May. It's a very short collection of op-ed pieces by George Orwell.

As ever with Orwell's take on contemporary issues, there are several pithy comments, many of which resonated with me. I'm planning to get around to blogging some of them soon.

I'm still writing, though. This month marked the one year anniversary of my blogging project about baseball cards. 

In an exciting development I sampled McVitie's latest foray into different flavoured jaffa cakes. Personally I didn't like these as much as some of the flavours I tried earlier in the year. But I did like the purple-hued packaging.

And that wasn't the only exciting purchase I made. Right at the end of the month, Cathy and I called into the newly reopened Firestorm Games and I bought something I'm very excited about. But that's going to wait for a post all to itself!

April 2021 End of Month Review

And another month of 2021 has passed. I had a conversation recently with a friend who said that the days feel long but the weeks are flying by. It does feel like that.

April is always one of my favourite months because it has my birthday at the beginning. This year my birthday was on Good Friday so I had the day off work and a long bank holiday weekend to follow it. There are some birthday traditions in our house. We had pancakes for breakfast and I had to wear the birthday crown.

I've blogged about how I spent my birthday building a big Lego model with Cathy. 

I also got a second big Lego model as a present - everybody say hello to Grogu (Baby Yoda) from The Mandalorian. It was an interesting build. His ears are adjustable so they can look droopy and sad.

The beginning of the month was also the start of the baseball season. I joined in the #OpeningDay selfie fun on Twitter, wearing my retro 1984 Padres World Series shirt and also the Slam Diego t-shirt that commemorated the Padres brief run of Grand Slams last season.

On the subject of baseball, I was also a guest on the Tea & Topps podcast, talking about my collection of Tony Gwynn cards, among other things. If you want to watch and listen then you can do so here.

Ahead of that podcast recording I was asked to create a baseball card of myself they could use in promotional posts. This was the result.

Meanwhile the pandemic restrictions are slowly easing. This meant that we were able to go to Shrewsbury and see my family for the first time since September. My brother's family has grown with the addition of two new children and I met my new niece and nephew for the first time. They are 4 and 3, and both really lovely. 

I also got to play some back garden football with my oldest nephew. He says his favourite player is Harry Kane. He likes to thwack the ball straight at his hapless uncle more than he likes scoring past him. 

We have also been able to meet up with friends, including visiting the back garden of some friends who have moved into a new house, and sitting on the patio of other friends watching their twins being fed dinner. It has felt nice to actually see people, even if meeting up is still a bit weird and stilted. 

Another part of pandemic life is getting vaccinated. I got jabbed in March. Cathy got jabbed in April, with a short-notice invitation. Unlike me, she didn't get to go to Jabs'R'Us down the Bay. Instead we went to Splott.

Scandalously, when she came back to the car after getting jabbed she showed me she had been GIVEN A STICKER! I never got offered a sticker! I was fuming, and pouted all the way home. 

And finally, our addition to our managerie of adopted animals this month was a Painted Dog who lives in the West Midland Safari Park. I'm going to do a blog post about the menagerie at some point. It's filling up with some cute animals. 

So that was April. Roll on May!

February 2021 End of Month Review

February seemed to go by quickly. We are now one sixth the way through 2021. Even in lockdown stuff happens, so I thought I would do another monthly round up.

I joined up with some friends via Zoom to watch the Superbowl. It was especially important this year because the team my friend Bryan supports, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, were in the Superbowl. He was a lot more nervous about the game than the rest of us. But the Bucs won comfortably. 

We had some extremely cold weather and even a bit of snow. That made staying indoors to observe the lockdown rules a bit easier - nobody wanted to be out in the bitter cold. 

At the beginning of the month, I had a surprise. A cuddly bat arrived in the post. 

Cathy had arranged an animal sponsorship with the Cuan Wildlife Rescue Centre in Shropshire. Several years ago we took a poorly hedgehog that we found in my brother's back garden to their centre and I have followed them on social media ever since. They do fantastic work caring for injured wild animals and successfully release most of them after nursing them back to health. 

This year for Valentines Day we decided to buy ourselves a big Lego set and build it together. We both wanted to build the Medieval Blacksmith set, so spent most of the day doing that. It was great fun. The finished article now has pride of place in our dining room. 

The build is full of quirky little details. One of my favourite bits was the brick-built bearskin rug.

I had a week off work, which was every inch the staycation. I had a steroid injection in my frozen shoulder so I had to stay indoors for three days. I used the time productively and caught up on several movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). I watched the three Thor movies in quick succession. One thing I like about the MCU are the little cameos between the films. There is a funny Captain America cameo in the second Thor film, and a great scene with Doctor Strange in the third one. 

Now that the Mandalorian has finished, Disney Plus have been releasing a replacement marquee television series in WandaVision, which is set in the MCU. We have been tuning in every week. Having the time to watch all the films again has been really useful for me to understand the TV series a bit better. I blogged about how it offered a surprisngly mature viewpoint on grief in one of the later episodes.

In terms of other achievements, I read a book for the first time in months.

It was more like a pamphlet really, but it made me think, so that was good. I blogged about it here.

On my baseball card blog, I reached the milestone of my 600th card featuring Tony Gwynn and also received my first Tony Gwynn card released in 2021. My collection was also featured in a guest post on the blog Baseball Fans Only. In another milestone, Twitter reminded me that it was my tenth Twitterversary this month.

And in exciting consumer news, we finally found the newly-launched McVities cherry Jaffa Cakes on sale. They have been sampled!

Review of 2020 - 5 positive things

As it's New Year's Eve, I thought I would close out 2020 with a blog post. While it's a hard year to review, for fairly obvious reasons, here are 5 things that made my year a bit special. 

1) February's Five Football Saturdays

It feels like a long time ago since I was freely able to go to football matches. Although the pandemic derailed my matchgoing last season, and has meant I haven't been to any games this season yet, I still feel pleased about getting to a game on all five Saturdays in February. This can only be done in a leap year, and only when the 1st and 29th of February are Saturdays. 

I blogged about the games I went to here

2) Achieving a collecting target

On 9 May I started a blog about baseball cards featuring the Padres greatest ever player, Tony Gwynn. I set myself a target of collecting 394 cards featuring him - in honour of his batting average in 1994, when he recorded a modern day record of .394. On 7 October I completed that mission. I've actually exceeded my target by some way and have now blogged well over 500 different cards.

3) A surprise knock at the door

Quite unexpectedly my former colleague Sean, who now works for Diabetes UK Cymru, knocked on my door and presented me with a Diabetes UK Cymru Director Award for Campaigning and Influencing Change. It was both unanticipated and humbling to receive that recognition and in the middle of a tough week, work-wise, it was a timely encouragement. 

Sean also took a photo of me and stuck it on Twitter. I'm holding up a planter that came with the certificate. In hindsight I could have posed a bit more elegantly. At least Sean timed his call when I'd just had a haircut and wasn't sporting Lockdown Hair!

At the end of October many of my NHS Wales colleagues were successful at the Quality in Care Diabetes Awards. There's a full write up here. One of the projects I've been involved in was shortlisted. It's a picture book about a dinosaur who has diabetes and the two girls who wrote it were also given special awards - which I was really happy about.

4) Dwi'n wedi dysgu Gymraeg 

I started learning Welsh in September 2019. In January this year I sat an exam and passed my Lefel Mynediad (Entry Level). I then went on and completed the Sylfaen (Foundation) course, most of which had to be taught on Zoom. I didn't find the remote learning as good as the classroom experience. 

I didn't enter for the Sylfaen exam because it would have been on a date I was supposed to be at Hampden park for a Euro 2020 game. That game didn't happen... and neither did the exam!

I have really enjoyed learning Welsh. It's a challenge because languages were never my strong point, but I am able to write the occasional email in Welsh now, and have some very basic conversations. I can also understand a bit of the commentary on Sgorio when watching the highlights of the Cymru Premier games, although I have a bit of a way to go before I'm able to follow it properly. 

5) An unusual Christmas

I blogged a couple of months back about "Lockdown freedoms", which were some of the good things about this horrible year. I worked from home from the middle of March. Although I miss my office colleagues and seeing people face-to-face, it does mean I have had lunch with Cathy nearly every day.

Another bonus for us was planning to have Christmas at home. In the 22 years we've been married, we had only spent two Christmases at home. Once we had a last minute change of plan when I was really poorly with a terrible bout of 'flu. And two years ago we had Christmas at home with my sister-in-law as Cathy recovered from surgery.

We decided a few months back that the most sensible course of action that was least likely to be derailed by events, was for Cathy and me to plan to have Christmas on our own at home - for the very first time. As it turned out, this plan worked out best for everyone. My brother's family expanded with two new children in November, so they needed some space. My foster-sister was given an appointment for dental extractions two days before Christmas and needed my Mum to go and stay with her to help with childcare. (They travelled up on the day the Tier 4 restrictions came in and Scotland closed its borders about an hour after Mum arrived in Edinburgh!)

So Cathy and I had our Christmas together, just us. And you know what? It was lovely. We had a leisurely time opening presents. I made a roast dinner. We went out for a little walk in the afternoon. We watched the new Pixar film, Soul, on Disney Plus in the evening. And it was just really nice and relaxing. 

So, looking back on the year, there have been some good times and I've managed to achieve a few things despite the best efforts of a nasty virus. Even the small wins are wins. 

Meanwhile, to kick off 2021, I'm planning on doing my Annual Christmas Card Audit for the 9th consecutive year! So keep an eye out for that...