I had a much-needed haircut. My hairdresser had to go back to Malaysia for a few weeks, and after 15 years of getting my hair cut by the same person I’d rather wait than go through the hassle of trying to find somewhere new.

A Johnny Cash Christmas CD that I found in a charity shop in Peckham been added to the seasonal rotation.

A view of the Thames. The sun is low in the sky. There are wooden structures in the river in the foreground.

The view from Deptford Strand on Wednesday morning. This is what passes for daylight in December

I installed a new lock on the electricity meter cupboard, which meant that I had to improvise a new strike plate to replace the broken one. I found a suitable metal bracket and bent it to fit. It’s not particularly secure, but that’s not the point. All I need is for the door to stay closed, and for delivery people to stop trying to put books in there, because they kept on falling out and getting ruined by the rain.

All my plans for Thursday were scuppered by the incessant rain. I managed a trip to Tesco, but that was about it.

That meant that I ended up doing everything on Friday: two loads of laundry, shopping, cooking for a pre-Christmas meal on Saturday, and some DIY.

I finally installed the elevated bicycle hook in the shed. The problem I had was that the hook needed to be screwed into something substantial, but the place it had to be was nowhere near the upright beams. They’re about 60 cm apart, and I needed the hook right in the middle.

The builders working on a loft extension over the road let me take a piece of leftover 18 mm ply a few weeks ago. I sawed it down to size (with a hand saw, it’s not hard) and used that to bridge the gap.

The bicycle that’s on the hook is harder to access than before, but now that there’s more space at floor level, the bike that I use regularly is much easier to get in and out.

The rebuilt Aldi on the Old Kent Road is finally open. The old single-storey building closed in 2022, and the site has been redeveloped into a residential tower – with an Aldi on the ground floor. My memory might be tricking me, but it feels as if it’s exactly the same size, layout, and location. The difference is that there are 168 new homes above it. That’s a better use of space, even if I wouldn’t personally fancy living that close to such a major thoroughfare.

Note for international readers: we get the good Aldi (Süd) in the UK and Ireland.

The Senegal Road cycle path is open again, which means a shorter route, less broken glass, and fewer interactions with motor traffic whenever I cycle to Peckham. Which is nice.

When the new cycle track at the Old Kent Road end of Ilderton Road is finally open, it will be even better. It looks like it’s almost complete.

On Saturday we took a trip to Bedford for a pre-Christmas meal with L—’s family. I had to make a starter, so I baked a fancy-looking sourdough loaf and made some mushroom pâté on Friday in preparatinon.

It was a good day out, no one had any fights, and the trains ran reliably.

I spotted that the ticket machines in the London Bridge tube station had the National Rail logo on them, so as no one was using them I decided to try to buy our tickets there. It worked. You can buy a ticket for the normal price, with a railcard if you have one. One oddity is that it’s issued as a single piece of card rather than the separate outbound and return legs you’d get from a railway station.

The other difference, however, is that the gates at London Bridge won’t let you in or out. I don’t know why; they worked at Bedford on both legs. It wasn’t a problem – the staff let us through – but it’s a bit of unnecessary hassle, and I probably won’t try that again.

(I know you can buy tickets on your phone, but paper doesn’t run out of battery.)

We sang in the carol service on Sunday evening. I was a bit worried about some croakiness earlier in the day, but my voice didn’t let me down in the end.

A handful of links this time: