12 years

Shortest day of the year today, so it must be our anniversary! In celebration, Nicky and I went for lunch at The Swan in West Malling. The food there is absolutely divine. My favourite was the Brioche "Pain Perdu" pudding with custard and jam!
For our anniversary I bought Nicky a Swarovski necklace. Rather worryingly, my gift was a DIY manual, but also a new scarf, and two Thorntons chocolates for traditional reasons!
Christmas holidays have well and truly started now - no more work for a couple of weeks. And, not that I'm wishing our Christmas holidays away, but it's only eight weeks today until our next Orlando trip. I phoned WDW Dine last night and made some reservations. We got our first choices, which was a bit of a surprise as we booked earlier last time and still had to be flexible. Perhaps this is a sign of the credit crunch impacting the parks - either there are fewer people going, or they'll all be taking a packed lunch! We've booked for lunches at Teppan Edo (the other one in Japan at Epcot), the Whispering Canyon Cafe, and Le Cellier.

Already there

Yes, so we did watch the X Factor final on Saturday evening, and we got the 1-2-3 in the right order. JLS did a song called "Already There" which I hadn't heard before which sounded rather nice. A quick bit of research showed that it had previously been done by Westlife, but of course, shameless cover artists that they are (You Raise Me Up) it wasn't their song originally. It looks like it is a Lonestar song. There is a great video on Youtube which, irrespective of what you might think of recent American (and British) military campaigns brings a lump to the throat. Unfortunately embedding is disabled on that video, so here's one with the same music but duller pictures!