... or at least it felt like it by the time I left the pub - Skehans on Kitto Road. It's a good local pub, and not surprizingly was crowded with people of all ages on the night before Christmas. Keith Richards lookalike Steve Boltz was playing a set of mainly sixties songs, from Arnold Layne to Dylan's She Belongs to Me.
Earlier on the jukebox they'd been playing some good music - including Egyptian Reggae by Jonathan Richman - and some terrible music - including Donny Osmond and the Bay City Rollers. The latter reminded me of the strangest encounter I've had in that pub - a couple of years ago I had a drunken conversation with somebody who claimed to have just missed out on fame with the Bay City Rollers as he'd been in a band with them all before they became successful. Must admit I was sceptical, but when I checked later I found that the details (names etc.) he'd given me were all correct. So maybe his story that not long before he'd brought an old friend for a drink in Skehans was also true - none other than Les McKeown himself, former teenage heart-throb and BCR lead singer. What next, David Cassidy in the Hobgoblin?
Well that was Christmas Eve. Not sure of final New Year's Eve plans but I know I'm not planning to spend too much time outside in this temperature. Will probably make it up to Telegraph Hill Park for midnight - if you haven't been there before, there's usually quite a crowd at the park's highest point by the tennis courts watching fireworks going off all over London. Not sure when this started - it's definitely been happening every year since the turn of 2000, but I can't remember whether it was happening before that.
It's also the closing party at Moonbow Jakes in Brockley tonight, sad occasion, New Year's Day will see that place empty.
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