A Game Of Two Halves

The first of December marks the start of the mad month where everyone rushes about chasing their shadows and for the majority of us, spending money we haven't really got. It's also a month that is special to me as my Daughter and Granddaughter celebrate their birthdays and so do I. Although when you get past 50 you don't really want the years to go by so quickly!

The Christmas lights are on in Southport and the town looks very pretty once again, this year The Atkinson has dressed for the occasion as you can see by the picture attached.

I've done quite a bit on the website although at first glance you probably wouldn't notice the difference. I have been adding text boxes and inserting one or two new pages. I have decided to add pages for the Marine Lake, Neville Street, Wesley Street and the Eco Centre.

I also revisited both Airfields at Hesketh Park and Birkdale Sands and took some more photo's of the old runways. I'm looking forward to telling the story of Southport's aviation history.

On the home front we had a day out!, now we don't get many of those these days, not without animals anyway. It's just too much hassle to be honest as two of our squad of four have separation issues and need looking after.

Anyway we had booked to go and see Katie Melua at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, we both used to like her music back in the day and thought it would be a nice night out. Ben and Shadow were booked in for their day out and Sky had the honour of showing Frankie how to be good - home alone.

As with most of our 'gigs' we try and make time to do something else as well, this time we thought it would be nice to pop into John Lewis and then get something to eat seeing as we had a couple of hours to kill.

I forgot how much i enjoyed John Lewis in Leicester, we haven't been to this store since we moved and of course it's always better in the run up to Christmas. We shall go back for the January Sales that's for sure! A list is being compiled already!

After moving the car closer to the Hall and grabbing a free parking spot in the process we found a pub and had a bite to eat before the big event.

The concert had mysteriously been put back half an hour and i'm pretty sure it wasn't because it clashed with the Liverpool v Leeds Utd match down the road. Anyway we had booked it so long ago we couldn't remember what sort of view we were going to get but i was assured by Mrs Sarson that 'we' wouldn't have booked bad seats.

She was right, front row upstairs bang in the middle, all we needed now was Ms Melua who has actually married James Toseland since the last time she performed in the UK.

I won't drag this out too much suffice to say we don't see many poor performances on our trips but this was definitely one of them. I'm afraid the shining star who sang 'Closest Thing To Crazy' back in 2003 has ended up being a very one dimensional background singer. She failed to connect with the audience in any way and her so called 'famous' Georgian Choir was a massive disappointment too. It's true what they say sometimes and you should never go and see an artist 10 years after they were good. We made a similar mistake with Meatloaf a couple of years ago.

Anyway we enjoyed the first half of our night out and the good news is all four dogs behaved impeccably as we knew they would.

Now to more pressing things, where are we going buy our Christmas Tree from this year?