Our survey said...

Last night turned out to be a success in the end. No hitches with the Chinese food (thankfully, after the cooking week from hell), seven happy people and not an exploding spring roll in sight. Except, apparently my cocktails (Gatsbys) were a wee bit too lethal for some. My friend S texted me today to say she is never drinking them ever again. I can only hope she managed to keep her head out of the loo long enough to salvage some of her Sunday. (S: What was in those bloody cocktails? Me: Southern Comfort, ginger and lime. S: Southern Comfort? Southern Hell! Me: Oops.) Oh dear.

Actually, it was probably the fault of the toxic cocktails that we all started playing a very merry version of Family Fortunes (with buzzers, 'our survey said' sound effects and everything - it was most exciting for a bunch of sozzled individuals). It's always the way when you've had a drink - even innocent games become innuendo laden. This was no exception. The air was positively blue. Even more so since we were in the presence of The Man Who Can Make Anything Into a Double Entendre. My Other Half took up the role of game show host/Les Dennis for the evening and even he struggled to keep his composure as the answers just kept getting worse and worse. This was a very tame one before the second pitcher of Gatsbys made an appearance:

Les Dennis: "Name something you might find in a church."
Team A: "Love beads!"
Team B: "A threesome!"

And it got slowly worse.

Anyhoo. For no apparent reason, the night then progressed into what can only be described as a gurning competition. You can imagine those pictures, I'm sure. Our living room was taken over by a herd of insanely grinning, cross-eyed, elasticated-mouthed lunatics. And on almost every photo, my face is apparently made of rubber and I look like the second cousin of Jim Carrey on day release from a mental ward . I really must work on that.

Humbug, Scrooge, Grinch...whatever...

Tonight I'm missing my work Christmas party. Yes, yes - I know. While it is considered to be bad form by many not to attend; in my defence, I was double booked. But before you rename me Ebeneezer - it might be the company-wide party I'm missing, but I've still got my team Christmas lunch to look forward to, and the customary drinks-after-work-on-the last-day-of-term affair. I very much doubt I'd have been missed anyway. There'll have been the same gossip as last year which I'll hear all about tomorrow - someone will have made a horrendous fashion faux-pas; someone will have kissed someone they shouldn't have; someone will have said something they definitely shouldn't have; and there'll be beautiful pasty faces, panda eyes and hangovers galore at work in the morning. And besides, I'm on a mission this week. And that mission is truffles.

In a vain attempt to save some dosh this Christmas, I decided to make all my presents for work. Last year when I was the new girl, it was sprung on me at the last minute that my team of eight all buy gifts for each other, so I had to hot-foot it into town on my lunch hour and hastily ended up making my own crackers. (Bought a couple of cracker kits and filled them with sweets and mini games. They went down well. My stress levels did not. Fighting the shopping crowds a few days before Christmas with an hour's window is not my idea of a good time.) So this year, I'm more prepared and fancy testing my culinary skills. I've been out for the ingredients, have jars and decorations a-go-go and am all set to whip up a confectionery storm. However, I have never made any such things before and sweet treats are known not to be my forte in the kitchen, so this could all go hideously wrong. If I end up with inedible chocolate golf balls that look like they were made on the Generation Game, I'll resort to Plan B: olives and herbs in oil.

And it's my last full week at work before Christmas this week - awoohoo! The little iPod is loaded with Yuletide tunes and I'm ready to sing. In my head, of course. I wouldn't subject the hungover office to the horrors of my tuneless voice. Then again...

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year...

The festive season is upon us. There's a whisper in the air about the office Christmas party; and while the group of stupid ditzes in my place of work (every office has such a group of empty-headed bints) are already whining about the lack of decent party clothes in the shops and swapping details of their latest idiotic crash diets - I'm happy to report that my diary is filling up nicely with get-togethers and drinks. Both myself and The Other Half are feeling more festive this year. Last year, we hadn't been living in our new pad for very long and were still unpacking when Christmas descended upon us - hence a hastily decorated tree was shoved up in the living room and cards were forgotten about.

In fact, both The Other Half and I have already had our first Yuletide gatherings and we're starting to feel very Christmassy. On Wednesday I had a long-overdue catch up with my two bestest gal buds from my MA - and we gossiped for a long, long time about all sorts and put the world to rights several times over. The Other Half had his official work do (he thinks there may be several Christmas lunches as well over the coming weeks)...and it was fancy dress. Cue some crazy shopping, and my good self and our friend J making a pink frilly tutu for a 6"5 bloke so he could go dressed as Ace Ventura. It worked. J's sewing skills are far superior to mine. Bizarre just doesn't sum up the sight of seeing a grown man dressed in a ballerina/Hawaiian shirt combo.

I have it on good authority that my Other Half danced like this.

Last night we headed out to stay over the new gaff of some pals - and got to meet their new dog, a five-month old Labrador named Charlie. Very cute and boisterous. Ate my shoe. And when we were unpacking and getting ready for bed, he broke into our room and ran off with The Other Half's jeans. Then socks. Then trainers. And proceeded to get his head stuck in our bag when he ran out of things to steal. This morning we all experienced something you'd rather not at this time of year - the holiday hangovers. I fear there may be many more to follow.

The Golden Girls do tapas...

For the first time in a long while, I forgot all about work over the weekend and had a bloody good time. On Saturday it was my Other Half's birthday, and although he was going out early sans me (to - eurgh - a football match of all things, but it was his birthday and that's what he wanted to do, so hey ho) we still had presents and breakfast in bed before he headed off until the small hours of Sunday. But this left me to do one of my favouristist things ever - cook! And not just any old cooking - cooking for the girls! That's the best kind. Friday night I went shopping for lovely things. I'd decided to make tapas so the trolley was filled with lots of Mediterranean eats. And the ingredients for sangria. Oh yes, this was gonna be a good 'un.

Saturday daytime was great - a cloud of chorizo smells filling the house; me singing along badly (I can't sing any other way) to the radio; feeling a bit Nigella-ish and looking forward to a good girly gossip. They didn't disappoint. My sides hurt for hours with giggles. Over dinner (which, true to form, there was far too much of. 'Serves 4' my arse. I could have fed a stadium) the wine and the gossip started to flow. I think the tale of the horrendous blind date my friend S had with a monotone Irish dude (reminiscent of The Most Boring Voiced Priest in Father Ted) and his love of chamomile tea was my personal favourite. I tried to re-tell the tale the following day to my bemused Other Half and couldn't because of the giggles.

We'd all decided to bring some school memorabilia around for a laugh, so apres eats retired to the living room to the sounds of PJ and Duncan (an inspired CD choice from friend C) and collapsed into drunken laughter over old photos and letters as the sangria was poured. Flicking through hysterical letters from friend J, my awful photos, drawings from S and poems from C, we realised that we were all in fact evil cows at school and are going to hell because of it. Anyway, it was so worth it. I haven't laughed as much in ages. And - bonus - I hoped the two pints of water (and the ice I was trying to find for about an hour before twigging it was in the freezer) I downed before I went to sleep would dilute the sangria in my bloodstream enough for me not to be hungover on Sunday. And it worked - hurrah! I am invincible. And will be living on tapas for a week. If the Other Half doesn't polish it all off, that is.

Sometimes all you need is a girls' night to make things right. Here's to another 50 years of them at least. And to lazy Sundays watching Police Academy 4 on the sofa. There is no end to my classiness.

Nuclear cocktails and red hair...

You can't beat a good cocktail. Especially half-price ones on a Thursday night. Which is the conclusion myself and some gal pals reached this week when we took our twenty-something nostalgia out in our kitten heels to the former haunt of our seventeen-year-old-selves. They'd cut the cocktail menu in half since we were last there (or were we now just old enough to know what we liked to drink instead of working our way down the whole menu?) but we still managed to quaff our way through several bizarrely-titled tipples.

It would have been rude not to have twice as many since they were half price anyway, was our philosophy. So, after several Caribbean Romances; Total Knock-Outs; a few of that old staple - Sex on the Beach; and a one whose name I forget but was a rather strange radioactive-glowing-green Incredible Hulk colour, we consequently spent the night cackling in the corner like the Witches of Eastwick reminiscing about the ridiculous fashions we used to sport in the very same bar almost a decade previous, planning to take a trip together and generally having a good old gossip about things I couldn't possibly repeat. Friday morning I woke up - mercifully still on holiday - with a headache only fizzy tablets can cure and thirst like no other.

Still, I had an appointment to keep and since my hair has taken on a life of its own and turned into rabbit-hutch hay over the past few weeks, I wasn't about to miss it. Plus I fancied a change of colour. My hair's been the colour of stringy dull rat tails for too long. Wasn't sure what yet, perhaps inspiration would hit me in the stylist's chair. It did. Not only am I very pleased that the straw-like quality has disappeared, but the length has been halved and I now have a swept fringe. Plus I'm chestnutty-red. And don't have to get up specially an hour earlier in the mornings now to wash and straighten my tresses. Anything that gives me an extra hour in bed is fine by me.

Maybe I should rename this 'the indecisive musings of a blasé partial-redhead?' Not so catchy? Yeah, well, it'll probably wash out soon anyway.

Pyjamas plus alcohol and Sundays equals...

Hangover TV. I'm not going to lie that I don't watch it occasionally. OK, I watch it quite a lot. But so do you, don't kid yourself. Especially on Sundays when T4 have that delightful and yet soul-destroying mix of all the pretty people in Hollyoaks, Friends and - throughout the summer months - repeats of Big Brother you didn't watch on Friday as you were too busy polishing off that bottle of Tia Maria. Oh, was that just me?

A recent conversation with a friend resulted in us hatching a half-arsed plan to launch our own TV channel that would constantly stream the hangover-TV shows that we and everyone our age would want to watch. You know the stuff, that TV gold of yesteryear that they never show anymore. All the children's TV favourites you used to race home from school to watch Andi Peters and Ed the Duck in the Broom Cupboard present. We even had potential advertisers worked out, and how we would need to bring in extra revenue. (Yes, we really were that bored.)

My friend's hangover-TV choices were very male-centric (and included some stuff I had to Google - Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, anyone?) while mine were the typical girly ones you'd expect, so we had a nice balance. Is there a point to all this then? Well, no, not really. But when Hollyoaks was on again this morning I was thinking about how hangover TV actually WOULD be so much better if you could watch all the things you loved decades ago, rather than the tangled love-lives of people in a Chester suburb who don't even have the decency to sport Chester accents. So this brings me to my very first list, and feel free to add or amend to it if you so wish.

My Top 10 80s Children's TV shows I Would Like to See on TV Again (catchy, eh?)

He-Man and She-Ra (you can't have one without the other)

Ah, the twins of Eternia and Etheria and their bad haircuts. You'd have thought Prince Adam would have stopped his mother from giving him a bob beyond the age of 5, but he didn't seem to mind. What I loved about He-Man was his direct-to-camera morals at the end of each story. And there was something a little bit seedy about She-Ra. Maybe it was her boots. Or her skirt.

Maid Marian and Her Merry Men
Maaaaaariaaaaaan! Robin Hood was a big Jessie and and Maid Marian was a tomboy. Tony Robinson hadn't started digging up fields at this point and minced about as the Sheriff with a band of lunatic guardsmen. That giant dude who always pops up in British films and TV shows as village idiots popped up as one of the Great Unwashed merry men.

Round the Twist
Set in a haunted lighthouse on the Aussie coast where 3 kids solve mysteries with a fantastic theme tune and really, really weird stories...does anyone remember the one with the phantom seagull with rubies for eyes who poohed on the kids so much they looked like walking marshmallow men?

Fun House
There's a bit of an urban myth around my hometown that a friend of a friend went on this and won. Pat Sharp displayed the best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) mullet this side of Limahl and kids ran amok in ball pools, with go-carts, gunge and all sorts. I wonder what happened to Melanie and Martina?

Jem and the Holograms
For obvious reasons (my name, in case you haven't worked it out) I was ALWAYS Jem whenever we acted this out in the playground. We often had some trouble recruiting a willing boy to play Rio though, and it's only looking back now that I wish I could have been one of the Misfits instead of Jem. Their music really was better.

Knightmare
Yes, it's really geeky and the effects are rubbish now but did you never wonder how they did it then? Or if they really were walking through a dungeon towards a door trying to avoid a gatekeeper with an axe on one side and a stick of dynamite about to go off on the other?

Stoppit and Tidyup
I'm sure Terry Wogan voiced these little critters. I don't remember all of them but 'Eat Your Greens' and the two bees, 'Bee-Have' and 'Bee-Quiet' stick out for some reason. I have a friend whose sister drew Stoppit and Tidyup on a t-shirt using Fluffit pens for her. Remember those? They made 3d designs on your clothes after you heated the drawings up with a hairdryer. Mine never worked.

The Moomins
A very bizarre cartoon. Think they were Polish? Anyway, white hippos who wear aprons and top hats and live in a lighthouse in Moomin Valley with a kangaroo and an annoying brat named Little Mai. There was one very creepy episode where they were all trying to fight a big hill with eyes who froze everyone around her.

Eerie, Indiana
The American version of Round the Twist in a way, with a very young Omri Katz (the one from Hocus Pocus - the guy who lit the Black Flame Candle) and his mate solving mysteries and having bizarre encounters with urban legends in the weirdo-filled town of Eerie.

Thundercats
Another one with a fantastic theme tune. They just don't make theme tunes like this anymore. I'm still slightly disturbed that the main character shares his name with waterproof kitchen flooring, however. Mummra was a very bad baddie and all the boys in my class had a slightly wrong crush on Cheetara in her leopard-print leotard.

A special mention goes to The Poddington Peas. Simply because I have been known to break out into a chorus of the Poddington song and frighten onlookers. Ooh, this could lead to a separate post about 80s toys. I'll make a note of that...