New Year's Day

Well, what did you do on New Year's Day? The snow's still lying deepish and crispish though a bit lumpy, so the cats did a lot of lying on blankets. Cassie left, Sirius right.

Sirius enjoys licking Cassie. Or possibly he just likes her to be clean before he lays his head down on her.

Most of the family came round for a meal, and afterwards Mr Life showed us that his electronic.. um.. whatever it is... can provide an octave of notes, whereupon our son-in-law played some creditably recognisable tunes on it. With both hands and much giggling.

Then Daughter 2 and Mr Life set up a game of Cranium. Clearly a serious matter.

In the course of the game, Daughter 1 uses Daughter 2 as a puppet - can't remember what she's supposed to be demonstrating.

Mr Life illustrates some phrase which Daughter 1, pausing from her knitting, identifies.

In a quiet moment, Son-in-Law models a hat he's made from Play Dough .

Next, however, he was given a card telling him to sculpt "a character" (from this Play Dough) and he merely waved the hat because it turned out that - though this was purely by chance - the character he was to illustrate was The Cat in the Hat. We knew he was a clever lad but we hadn't realised he was psychic...

Daughter 2 draws with her eyes shut and my mother and aunt have to guess what she's drawing.

They succeed because she manages rather a creditable roller skate. Not bad for blind drawing!

We had a good time. Even my confused aunt enjoyed it, though we all got slightly hysterical from time to time. For example, when she had to write down three words associated with "Paris", she wrote "Seine", "tourist" and ... "cat". Then three words associated with "cruise ship": "tourist", "boat" and ... "hunger".

However, one question was a "true or false": "Is it true that if you need to give an intravenous transfusion, if you have nothing more suitable you can use coconut water as liquid?" And she very confidently said this was true. And it was. (She's a retired doctor.)

I can't quite imagine being in that position: have needly thing, yes; tubey thing, yes; oh dear, I've forgotten the drippy stuff but hey, luckily I have a coconut here.