Now I know how many Christmas carols it takes to fill the Albert Hall

This Christmas Eve afternoon we went to the amazing Royal Albert Hall to see and hear their Carols by Candlelight concert. It was, if your excuse the London slang, dead brill.

There was an orchestra and chorus and a conductor all dressed up in the period of Mozart playing traditional religious and secular (thank you word-of-the-day calendar!) Christmas carols, some of which we got to sing along with! The announcer/conductor was very pleasant and funny (he told a hilarious elf joke*) and he was very good at getting us all to sing along very loudly. In fact, there was a special competition to see who could sing "Good King Wenceslas" the loudest of all the audience members and I won and the prize was that I got to go up on stage and beat the kettle drum during the next carol! Boom boom boom I went! Everyone in the Mozart Festival Orchestra agreed I was v. good at it!**

There were also readings from A Christmas Carol and the story of Jesus's birth from the Bible, a special guest appearance by Father Christmas and we sat in a very special box in the second tier. And had Coca-Colas at the interval! All in all it was a very special Christmas treat and very good value for money.

Add to that: we had a lovely Christmas luncheon at Maggie Jones's just off Kensington Church Street just before. It was good solid hearty English food: among us we had onion soup, prawn cocktail, turkey and stuffing, pork roast with mash, new potatoes, veg and bread, and hooray! wonderful bread and butter pudding with custard and apple crumple with fresh cream. It was definitely the nicest Christmas Eve day ever.

*An elf is driving down the highway and he's knitting while he's driving. A police car pulls up alongside the elf and the police constable yells "Pull over!" The elf leans out the window and says, "No, it's a scarf."

**Editor's note: Certain events in this blog entry exist only in Mister Bull's imagination.