First, I would send love and best wishes for the season and the New Year to the most loyal patrons in the history is the Pig’s Arms.

As the great Pig’s Arms world champ once said, “I loves yez all”.

And then, a cautionary tale about getting screwed at Christmas. I choose to start my story now.

Last evening, still smarting from the weekly blue, FM and I called a Christmas Eve truce and popped a bottle of bubbles. Being moderate drinkers (and being careful to not rip the scab off last week’s wounds), we plugged the bottle with the previously intact stopper, corkscrew show above in its mortally wounded state.

Well the bottle of bubble and the stopper almost fit in the bottom shelf of the fridge door. And if I put it in on an angle (as the Bish said to the actress), the weight of the next shelf up creates a little bit of counter-effervescent pressure.

But today, when we decided to rejoin our little French buddy, I withdrew the stoppered bottle and turned to retrieve two glasses, and … BANG !!!! The metal plug shot into the kitchen sky and fell back to earth .. or more precisely the granite bench top and like a downed plane, the fuselage broke in two, as you see above.

Thankfully no champagne was spilt in this farrago and notwithstanding a general lack of stopper, we approach the new year with a renewed sense of porpoise and other aquatic life on this third rock from a dying sun. And my darling FM and I send you all our hopes for you too. And a new stopper.

Lots of love, Emm and FM xxxx