Happy New Year to you all. I type this with a huge New Year’s Eve lash up kind of bandage on my little finger which makes hitting anything on the extreme left of my keyboard a bit hit and miss so please forgive any errors!

I know you are all dying to know what necessitates such an inconvenient arrangement but if you are of a squeamish disposition you might want to look away now. Or perhaps in a paragraph or two whilst you permit me a degree of suspense building.

I haven’t really celebrated “New Year’s Eve” since the Millennium. A combination of too many children, not enough available friends and my disinclination to party have resulted in it generally being a quiet affair. But this year we had an invitation for an early doors gathering for games and nibbles. Three families, nine children and someone else’s house. Perfect.

In the morning I raced up to Marks and Spencer’s for party food and ‘free’ cava and around we all traipsed mid afternoon ready for a bit of fun. And fun we had. First, a glass or two of bubbly as we attempted to chat over the noise of the children careering around the house unrestrained. Once relative calm had been restored, we played a game whereby each team had to build a structure using spaghetti and marshmallows. Predictably, those teams containing a dad focused on structure whilst those with a mum had a different emphasis.

I know you’re still waiting for my finger story but please indulge me a moment longer whilst I briefly consider New Year’s Resolutions. January is a terribly time to make life changes. Everyone is exhausted and skint with a slight veneer of self loathing and a long winter ahead. It’s a time for pampering and indulgence not strict regimes and yet more guilt. That said, I do feel that I need to work smarter this year and waste less time on the trivialities of life. Already I feel failure snapping at my heels.

So, back to slicing those mini burger buns with the new ceramic knife. I was chatting, I knew the knife was razor sharp and I’d had two glass of champagne. So when I sliced the pad virtually off my little finger I was entirely to blame. It bled. Well, you can imagine and kitchen roll isn’t quite as absorbent as I’d been led to believe. I was playing things down whilst trying to hide my bloody finger from a particularly squeamish child. There was talk of Casualty which I quickly batted away. In the end I was whisked off to some poor GPs house who reconstructed it with steristrips and a tube bandage.

It’s hardly life threatening but it will mean that New Year’s Eve 2011 will be one of those that goes down in the annals of time as one to remember. And that, after all, is what good memories are all about. Happy New Year !