claytoncast

At the moment I'm in Yorkshire. I've driven up here to collect Mum to bring her back down to london so that she can spend Christmas with Rich and myself. This was not our original plan. She had tickets for the train tomorrow, but since her recent illness she has lost the confidence necessary to make the journey, so my Christmas has turned into a bit of a driving marathon. Having driven up here today, tomorrow I'll drive her back to London. If we can get her up. Depression has set in again over the last week and in the mornings all she wants to do is stay in bed. Once she's up she is absolutely fine and enjoys her day but then the next morning we're back to square one. Thanks to her wonderful carers who are my Christmas angels and her friend Pat, she has got up each day by lunchtime but it's proving harder and it raises all sorts of questions for her future care next year - questions I can't and indeed don't really want to answer at the moment. Suffi

I suppose at this time of year we all do more than our fair share of shopping. Having finished work on December 2 I've had quite a bit of time to get my plans in order to shop for Richards family and relatives and our friends. It's time of year when you see the best and worst of customer service. Regular readers of my blog will know it is something that I can all too easily clamber onto my soapbox to rant about. So let me highlight a couple of this year's winners and losers. Marks & Spencer seem to be well up there with trying to make it easier for the customer. They've got a new online delivery system whereby you can order the items online and if you don't want to wait in for delivery, or indeed pay for a delivery charge, you can have them delivered to a branch that you designate at the time of ordering and pick them up from there. I did that with a couple of items and there they were waiting for me in the Croydon Marks & Spencer yeste

So it's the party season and that time of year when everyone is looking forward to the days when they don't have to go into the office and the holidays are looming. Except of course if you're a freelancer. As a freelancer holidays can sometimes be forced upon us. I did what looks like my last piece of work until next year on Friday. A days filming down in Brighton. Uneventful enough within itself, and yet it was filled with an impending sense of doom that it will be over three weeks before I do any paid work again. It's early this year. Normally my last day at work before Christmas is sometimes in the week leading up to the 22nd or so, but this year my work schedule has brought an early bath and now the days are stretching out in front of me with the prospect of nothing much to do except Christmas shopping, house work, and planning for our production of "Green Forms" in January. I can hear some of you sighing and saying what a delicious prosp