I WAS back on the Northern Belle train last week – working (if you can call stuffing your face and handing out a couple of books working).
The number of people who say to me: ‘I’d love to go on that and I’m going to one day’ and I reply that if your funds can run to it (and we’re hardly talking bankruptcy-size filthy lucre) then you absolutely should because it’s wonderful.
These same people would be telling friends who professed a want to go on ‘you must’ and yet it is so much easier to persuade others than ourselves.
Life is fragile and all those things on bucket lists should be made active. So when you’re sitting all content with a sherry inside you, give yourselves a Christmas present: a promise that next year you are going to do something you really want to, push the boat out, go on the train, take the flight, make the booking at a top chef’s restaurant and then put that plan into action.
You can thank me later.
I was very sorry to see that Callum Simpson didn’t win his fight. (Terrible ref not stopping the fight to allow him to put in his gum shield. He could have lost all his flaming teeth!)
He is such a great ambassador for Barnsley. Never met him but he comes across as someone who would be the same in front of a camera as off it.
He has a wonderful following in Barnsley, we all love someone who champions their home town and doesn’t see the need to pretend they are a bit above their roots – plenty do.
And he always seems a proper nice lad, someone who takes his sport seriously and is maybe a little bit gobsmacked for the high regard in which he is held.
I wish him the very very best next year. In the words of Chumbawamba ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never going to keep me down’. We are all just killing time until the rematch and we’ll be behind you all the way for it, CS.
How lovely to see the report of Princess Anne visiting my friend Wayne Padgett’s scone factory ‘Haywood and Padgett’ last week.
The factory really did have the humble beginnings of ‘man selling stuff in a market’ and before you know it, they’re making over a million scones a day.
I love stories like that and I’m very fond of Wayne. He once won an auction to name a character in one of my books and he wanted his dad in it.
That book became all about dads as I’d just lost my own (and also scones) and if Wayne hadn’t won it, it would have been a very different book and it was as if this book was meant to be.
Lovely man, lovely family and I wish them even more success going forward. I hope they sent the lovely princess home with some of their most excellent products, because they do a belting cherry scone.
We are finally here at the big day yet again so do enjoy yourselves whether you’ll be in a throng or having a quiet one.
And if you have to work on Boxing Day, I hope you have an especially good Christmas Day and squash the full season into 24 hours.
It used to be so much better in the old days when shops shut for much longer and everyone had an enforced rest. Why do we stock up for a siege and yet feel compelled to go out to a supermarket on Boxing Day just because they’re open? What can be that flaming important? Have a good one, folks. May we all have the Christmas we deserve.
