2025: M&A’s Christmas staycation-daycation with friends…

We woke up in our separate abodes to a gloriously sunny Christmas Day morning. How exciting that it was actually upon us.

We both got up and did our exercises, Maice in her flat doing her Yoga with Adrienne and me in Nikki’s flat doing my Lucy wyndham Read, much to Nikki’s disgust who seemed to have woken up with a bit of a light head and didn’t wish to partake in an exercise routine so early in the morning.

After our energetic fitness routines I made my way down to Maice’s abode with my bag of ‘stuff’ where we were convening for breakfast whilst Nikki went off to visit her family.  We FaceTimed our friend Jane for a Christmas Day catch up then we made breakfast. As always it was a fine affair of scrambled eggs infused with Parmesan cheese and some lovely smoked salmon stirred in, all sat atop a bed of two crumpets! Yes, this was no ordinary breakfast, this was an M&A special. We know, we know, it should have been brown bread or brown toast but we thought we’d shake things up a bit and go off piste and though we say so ourselves, it was very tasty.

It may have been a lovely sunny day but it was very, very windy…..another ‘fresh’ breeze according to the weather forecasters. Now, over the years it has always been our intention to go swimming or dipping as we prefer to call it, on Christmas Day wherever we may be but we’ve never managed it before, until today that is. We set off down to the beach at Greenhill with Helen and Rachel who was going to look after Winston whilst the three of us were in the water and act as our official photographer, you know to document the fact that we actually did it. The sky was so blue and it was so sunny but then you looked out to sea and there were these extremely rough waves with huge white horses galloping towards the shoreline. We had no intention of going in too deep, just up to our knees plus we also didn’t anticipate being in for very long however we didn’t get as far as our knees when both Maice and I got knocked over by a wave, then Maice was knocked over a further two times with Helen trying to keep her upright as we made our way out of the sea. Our ‘dip’ lasted just a minute but at least we did what we set out to do and albeit the water was cold, the air temperature was colder than the sea.  We returned to the car, hugged our hot water bottles and enjoyed a shot of salted caramel rum to warm us after which we headed back home for lovely hot showers.

Claire arrived at midday and we set off to the Royal Standard with Toby’s Christmas present, designer socks, and enjoyed a lovely time with the locals and two bottles of prosecco. It was such a lovely atmosphere in the pub and a great time was had by all.

Back home Helen and Maice were in charge of the cooking in their respective ovens whilst Nikki was poised over the stove, broccoli prepared and in the pan waiting for the go ahead to switch on the cooker. After Maice, Helen and Rachel had walked the Christmas dinner up the many stairs to Nikkis flat we cracked open the Taitinger champagne, we toasted our good health and prosperity and enjoyed a fabulous Christmas lunch. Salmon on croute for Nikki, Claire, Maice and I and duck breast for Helen and Rachel accompanied by roast potatoes, scallop potatoes, braised red cabbage, carrot and swede, sprouts and of course Nikki’s broccoli. It was a dinner fit for us fabulous ladies. It was delicious. Claire had brought profiteroles and panacotta but had also been given instructions by Nikki to bring a lemon pudding, which apparently she did but there was no sign of it on the day. We hunted high and lo and it was nowhere. It’s certainly a mystery as to its whereabouts.

Nikki had purchased a trivia quiz game as we do a weekly quiz at the standard and thought we could do with educating our brains. We thought she was going to test us on a few of the cards but she read out ALL the cards which took a very long time and by which time Maice had dozed off.  At this point we said goodbye to Claire, not because she’d had enough quizzing but she was off away the next day so wanted to go home and pack.

The five of us carried on the games starting with the 20p dice game or CLRS as it is otherwise known (centre, left, right, steal) in which I won, then we played Buckaroo which was absolutely hilarious and required lots of concentration, difficult when we were all under the influence of alcohol! We then played Rachel’s made up game which was good fun and finally we played Pass the Pigs, another simple but fun game which came highly recommended by our friend Susan. At this point we felt the need for cheese and biscuits which had been left out to ‘breath’ and was most delicious. This final indulgence killed most of us off and Maice, Rachel and Helen retired to their beds. I would have retired to mine only NIkki said ‘let’s have another glass of Prosecco and watch a film! What’s a girl to do!

Happy Christmas one and all xx