Making a list, checking it twice…

That crazy time of the year is fast approaching.  People take time off work to be with family, a lot of whom are only seen this one time of the year usually because it takes a year to recover from the last time you saw them!  It’s also the time the UK is liable to be hit with a snow flurry that brings our transport system to a grinding halt.

As a gesture to the European Community, showing that we wanted to contribute, the UK donated poor excuses for shitty trains when the weekend in Paris I won was cancelled due to the wrong type of snow in France that rendered the network worse than useless and highlighted a disaster recovery plan that was straight out of Dilbert.

That said I do find it quite amusing that suddenly whatever you do is not enough unless you have a Twitter account churning out constant updates for these news addicts who can’t bear to wait more than a few seconds for an update.  Can you just imagine the unenviable task it would be to run around a Eurostar terminal asking what the latest news was for the company Twitter feed?  I’m pretty certain the majority of replies you’d get wouldn’t be fit to broadcast.  It worries me that people have so much dependence on things like Twitter. What are they gonna do when it gets hacked and goes down for days?  Will they take to the streets and riot?  Don’t laugh, I’m being serious! ;)

So, after getting up at 4.30am I was returning home by 8am feeling a little dejected, no Parisian jazz club for me.  Every cloud however… The cancelled weekend away meant I was home when the postman came with a package, What could it be? I thought.  I didn’t recognise the handwriting so I checked for wires and the sound of ticking and finding nothing untoward I opened it…  It turned out to be my Bloggers Secret Santa gift!  A pair of re-usable hand warmers!

Now, I don’t know about you, dear readers, but I hadn’t come across these beauties before.  My memories of hand warmers were little asbestos-like lined devices that you put a piece of lit charcoal in.  It was effective but messy.  I feel like such a Rip Van Winkle, these little gel pouches have a piece of metal in them, you click the piece of metal which triggers some chemical reaction causing the gel to crystallize and in so doing generates a temperature of around 55 degrees.  They stay warm for about 45 minutes and then to recharge them you pop them in a pan of boiling water for about 5 minutes until the gel liquidifies again.  Ingenious!  I used them on Saturday when I walked to Tesco to buy milk, after leaving the milkman a note telling him not to leave any for the weekend as I was off to Paris… With luck the prize weekend will be rescheduled…fingers crossed.