New Year's Day 2006

Christmas and new year are traditionally times to spend with one’s family.

However when your family is 10,000 miles away, whoever is nearby suddenly becomes your family for the day.

This new year’s day, my family comprised of Flatmate Dave, Flatmate Cockney Neil, Flatmate Cockney Neil’s daughter Jessica, Neighbour Tim downstairs, and Neighbour Tim downstairs’ cat Smokey.

So we all trooped down to Foodtown to stock up on reserves for a new year barbecue.

Here's Tim improvising in the absence of a food mixer.

Clockwise: Steve, David, Jessica, Neil, Tim and Smokey. If you look at my right arm, you can see that I still haven’t lost the sunburn I got while Kayaking For Kenya.

Afterwards, Dave enabled me to fulfil a 15-year-old ambition.

Back in 1991 I’d bought Dire Straits’ comeback album On Every Street, which featured the track Calling Elvis.

Said track had also been doing the rounds in the singles charts, and as such the video was repeatedly getting air-time on The ITV Chart Show.

The thing is, The Chart Show had developed a nasty habit of only showing the start of each video, so I’d never seen how it ended.


Calling Elvis had been shot extensively in Supermarionation, and featured Knopfler comissioning the entire cast of Thunderbirds to head out on a mission, apparently looking for Elvis. (or possibly the human in the bathtub)

So tonight we all sat down and watched the whole thing, start to finish, twice, picking over its background details, subliminal juxtapositions, and hitherto unseen dialogue-based ending.

Nice.