Dr Liseuse

I just want to mark a Christmas Miracle: C and I went out for post-work Christmas drinks and dinner and are both home before midnight, not incredibly drunk, and ready for our busy long weekends. C is packing up her flat and I have friends visiting.

When I (Catholic) was at university I lived w/ someone who self-described as "culturally Muslim and adherent when under my parent's roof" & a very secular Jew. We really liked it when the missionaries came round. We made them tea & they handed us leaflets and we all gently disagreed with each other.

I don't often pine for locked accounts but I have the Greatest Work Story and I don't want to risk entirely giving away where I work.

It smells like Scandinavian forest walks (cardamom, juniper, black pepper and pomelo for a hint of tart freshness) and I love it.

I went to one of their workshops last month and made myself a very cardamom heavy perfume. Is it of their standard? In no way. But it is lovely!

Fun! I'm also going to the opera next year and it's not a thing I ever do, so I'm slightly concerned that whoever is checking tickets at Opera North will look me up and down and realise I'm not supposed to be there 😬

I got it from a lovely friend! Pact are my coffee supplier but I hadn't bothered with the Advent calendar because I bought myself the Bonne Maman one.

I'm really enjoying their 24 day Advent calendar and am similarly pleased by their marketing tactics.

Have I managed to get The PSF to agree timings for this yet? Or tell me what he and his wife want for Christmas? No, no I have not. Am I metaphorically gnawing the skin on my fingers about it? Yes.

I just got drenched on the way back from town (errands after work). So many slow walking people!

If I ever become Democratic Dictatress of the UK I am going to enforce a series of trivial but important to me laws. One of them is going to be an enforcement of references to the Twelve Days of Christmas being correct. Today is *not* the fifth day of Christmas.

Oh 100%. It is also not (which astounded a colleague last year) the only cheese I buy, but it is the excellent cheese from the cheesemonger. The gruyere for the dauphinois can come from Marks and Spencer!

The Christmas cheese order is in! Is it, as always, entirely too much cheese for one person? Yes. Yes it is.

One of the weirder bits of my job is that sometimes I have to read tax advice (usually related to leases) and my god the things this reveals that I do not understand and do not wish to understand.

The spas always sound lovely but they are, alas, in Ontario and I am not!

Ah, I see that the person I have a similar email address to is busy booking their December spa treatments again. I do hope they have a good time, and that the change from couples massage to a singles massage is not an unhappy one.

And that's a couple of Christmas presents sorted! Everything is gorgeous!

It's easy for me to say this but I do think both they and the Guides should have fought this. And IANAL, but I don't think either organisation would have been in breach of the law.

(Of course, that doesn't mean SLAPP isn't expensive to fight, nor that there wouldn't have been other unpleasantness)

I like this thought!

That is a very tempting idea. We do have some incredibly lifelike medical mannequins and I'm sure we could do a display.

That is the gist of their requests. They seem to think that the staff in the office are staring into their house and they deeply hated them having the window open in summer. For the price of their house they could have bought a much bigger house in open countryside which I think would suit them more

It does, doesn't it. Like people who buy houses under flight paths and complain about planes.

No, we're really not new! And the building they are complaining about is very old!

A small jar of apricot and honey conserve, thanks to Bonne Maman and a lovely coffee with hints of plum.

Someone bought a house on a road which backs on to the university campus. I receive about three emails a semester from them complaining that someone is staring out of the window of one of our buildings into their house. Or, in reality, someone is in an office looking in the direction of the window.

I've had Tom Lehrer's Lobachevsky in my head all weekend. It's a great song, I love it very much, but the punctuation of the talk radio show in my brain with "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name / Hi!" is wearing thin.

If you too would like an earworm:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCr-...

My external examiner had to say "given that Liseuse didn't write about witches and midwives and has explained why, can we just move on in a non-witches and midwives direction and suggest it as a future project?" to my internal.

I love panto season

Ah, I did know the plot from childhood ballet but that made it its own specific delight. If you get the chance to see Matthew Bourne's Midnight Bell it is superb.

'I Only Want To Be With You' came on the radio and immediately I was a teenager, dancing in the living room with my mother, the Ally McBeal soundtrack playing. What a glorious song and a throwback to such a fun memory.