The festive film and music fest at chez Rullsenberg

Xmas Eve was taken very easy after the excitement of Cloud finishing work on the Friday. Rise up and buy some essentials from an all-too-busy local Co-Op store, and then back for a wealth of CD playing (not in order of playing):

Starsailor: Love is Here
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Eels: Electro-Shock Blues
Jam: Compact Snap
Gram Parsons: GP / Grievous Angel
The Trojan Story Vol 2 (2 disc set)
Now Hear This! (Word Collection 35)
John Peel's Festive 15 (from Uncut magazine)
Tortoise: Standards
Born in the USA: Vol 1 The Great American Songbook (from Mojo magazine)
Ben Folds: Rockin' the Suburbs

Brilliant stuff and suitably eclectic.

We then shifted to the TV to kick off Xmas day with the noir classic The Big Sleep. Every bit as good as I remembered and Cloud thoroughly enjoyed it too. Snappy dialogue to die for (as several characters do).

We then treated ourselves to as much of Casablanca as we could squeeze in before vanishing to our neighbours: it was timed just right for me and Cloud to blub furiously at the roulette scene, sharply intake our breath at how Rick tells Laszlo "ask your wife", sob even more dramatically at The Marseillaise, and laugh aloud at Capt. Renault's wonderful chutzpah of "I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked...." and the delivery of his winnings. Beautiful stuff.

Then, as mentioned, it was off to our neighbours. It was great fun to spend time with them - despite crying, burping baby dolls (yes, they are that age) - not least because we were given a gingerbread house, a tea spread of delights, and watched Madagascar. By the end, yep, as predicted, we were singing and bopping "I like to move it"...

Then, as the tidy-up after pudding finished and the girls were back with the screaming, crying, burping, rasperberry-blowing dolls, I glanced at my watch: yes, my inner alarm clock must have gone off as my (must be running a couple of mins fast) watch read 7pm! Yikes! Thankfully I had warned my neighbours that I was due to be a really unsociable guest and they grinned as I took off out the door.* Our TV came on just as the pre-comment trailer finished...

Perfect.

What can I say about The Christmas Invasion except that it was funny, touching and exciting. It built nicely on the hints from the CiN special and moved us on from CE's performance in the best way possible. "Missed me?" Oh lordy... sweetie, only the lack of a TV signal would have stopped me from missing you.

[Note: reading the plea from Marie's bro in the comments to this post - another gem btw from her - reminded me of when Gentlemen's Relish was scheduled a few years ago. For some reason the TV signal for the BBC went down and at one point it seemed that I would have to phone around the country to locate someone on another transmitter to tape it for me. It all worked out, but I was having kittens for a while].

After that excitement, we had to find something to watch so it was into the pressies to locate Sneakers, a long-time favourite of me and Cloud, if only for the line in response to wanting "peace on earth and goodwill to all men":

We're the United States Government - we don't do that sort of thing!

Hee. Fab entertainment.

To round things off, we then dropped in on one of our favourite episodes of Black Books: another of our stocking fillers. To those who know the series, it's from season 1 and features "the man in his hair", the arsehole who reads the shipping news on radio 4 ("he confuses me"), and the ever-reliable to make me laugh aloud sight of Dylan Moran as a rather disgruntled red and white striped dwarfish member of staff in a burger bar. BWAH!

And so to bed... today has been mostly loading to i-Tunes day. And repeatedly playing the Calla track. I love my computer perhaps even more than Radio 6. But not as much as Cloud... obviously...



* Of course I wrote a profuse apology for being a poor guest after it had finished, but woah. I'd been waiting since the summer for this!