"Christmas comes earlier each year" whingers are a perennial hazard. You know the type - people who insist that it is obscene that the deccies in the shops appear in early or mid-November and maintain that they can remember when it Didn't Used To Happen. Get real! It's happened for as long as I can remember and probably a lot longer than that. This is of course completely different from the wholesome practice of students having two Christmases, at the end of term and the conventional time, or indeed the tinsel and Christmas tress adorning the stage at the Spearmint gig last night. It was quite touching, with a bank of fairy lights as a backdrop to add that touch of glam. Somebody proceeded to scatter polystyrene snow from a polystyrene cup over each band member in turn. Little did I imagine when my dumbstruck department was transfixed by the giant hailstones falling over Harcourt Hill that morning that it was merely a precursor of yet stranger precipitation. Shirley didn’t merely address the audience, at one point he was *in* the audience, walking up to people and singing to them in turn, which was nice. And the songs...."We’re Going Out", "Oklahoma", "You are Still my Brother". Amazing. Have you noticed how people are casting the net a little wider when selecting where to go for the work Christmas bash? We, for example, are going to a Thai restaurant. It's encouraging to see people who normally whine "How about something *different* from the *same old* turkey this year?!" actually doing something about it. So now we'll see the "Christmas comes earlier each year" brigade rampaging through our department stores, trashing tinsel and pummelling the cloned Santas. Maybe. Looking forward to Sodastream tomorrow.... Mark. _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+