The upshot is that the BBC is having to pay Rupert Murdoch £10 million a year to have the privilege of BBC programmes being shown on Sky. I feel as if I’ve wandered into an alternative universe again. I thought that we lived in a Capitalist society which is very simple to follow. If you have something which someone else wants then they have to pay you for it, if you want them to have it. So why isn’t Murdoch paying the BBC £squillions to be allowed to broadcast BBC programmes?

I have always prided myself that I haven’t knowingly added any money to the Murdoch coffers. I’ve never bought one of his newspapers and I don’t have Sky, so I’m more than a wee bit peeved – actually I’m incandescent – that my licence fee money is going to Murdoch.

I’ve always thought that the TV licence is just about one of the best bargains around. I would even be quite happy if Auntie Beeb didn’t block the internet viewing so that people in other countries could look in. That would stop Murdoch in his tracks, which could only be a good thing.

Please BBC, stop giving money to Rupert Murdoch et al!

Square up to politicians. Nothing is perfect but the BBC has a place in the hearts of most Brits which is second only to the NHS.

Why am I not surprised that this whole situation came about through Maggie Thatcher’s sucking up to Murdoch. Cakes and ale anyone?!

I could go on at length but I can already see that 2012 is going to be a year of grumping and groaning. Now, does anybody know how I go about setting up an online petition to support the BBC?

We had turkey and ham with lots of roasted veggies and yes sprouts which Jack and I love anyway but this time I used the Jamie Oliver shredded sprout recipe with bacon.

How solemn do we all look? We had fun, honestly!

Believe it or not, I had never made a trifle before and I put this one together, not bothering with a recipe. Next time I’ll use more jelly and less custard I think. I used a shop bought Swiss roll for the first layer then topped it with strawberries and jelly then custard and cream with strawberries topped with grated chocolate. Very tasty.

Just so that we had a choice of puddings I also made chocolate cheesecake based on Lorraine Pascale’s recipe which you can see here. I tweaked her recipe slightly. Instead of all chocolate digestives I made a third of them Amaretto biscuits to make a more interesting combination and I did the cheesecake in two layers, the first of which was all mixed in very well and the second layer was just roughly mixed to leave some of the cream cheese unmixed which made the flavour better I think as I like a bit of a surprise in each spoonful. As you can see I had a bit of a disaster with my piping nozzle thingy and ended up scraping the melted chocolate out onto the melted milk chocolate instead of having a beautifully feathered decoration. In future I’m not going to bother faffing about with the melted chocolate on top as the cheesecake is nice enough without it I think.

Boxing Day is always a rest for me as it’s the leftover ham and turkey made into a pie which takes no time to throw together. For some reason the pastry has shrunk away from the edges of my pie dish but it tasted fine.

So that’s it all over for another year. Now for Hogmanay!

It’s a lovely place actually, not very big shop-wise but it has a lot of independent shops and it’s all very quaint. I wanted to take a photo of these buildings near the town centre because the wee white one in the middle was leaning every way it possibly could – backwards, forwards and from side to side – all at the same time!

There were some quite grand looking buildings in the town but somehow I’m always drawn to the wee quaint ones which ordinary people will have lived in for centuries. We tried to get into this antiques shop, the lights were on, but nobody was at home!

I don’t think a town is a proper town unless it has a river running through it and this one is very scenic.

Swans and all! Although I have to admit that this is as close as I like to get to swans. They might look very elegant but in my experience the males are very bad tempered. There’s a particularly nasty one at Linlithgow Loch which just lives to hiss at you.

During all our visits down south we had no problems with parking, we usually managed to park legally and for free and very close to the town centres. At Stamford we were about a three minute walk from the town. It’s such a change for us because all of the towns in Scotland have seem to have pay and display car parks or parking meters. The local councils just don’t understand that it really puts people off visiting their towns if they have to worry about the expense of parking tickets and feeding meters then it doesn’t make for an enjoyable experience. No wonder our high streets are dying on their feet!

I looked it up on You Tube TV and according to that, there are ways of watching it if you can’t view it through the iPlayer. It’s well worth giving it a go anyway!

I’m wondering why Saunders does a Scottish accent for this because I don’t think that Stella Gonet has one in The House of Eliott, although she is Scottish – or is it just that I can’t hear it!

Anyway, back to You Tube, I noticed that there are some videos of The Great British Bake Off on it. I never watch any of these reality/competition things, Big Brother and ‘Strictly’ type things just don’t appeal to me. But I must admit that I started watching the Bake Off, well the first one was on in the background when I was on my Netbook and I kind of got dragged in.

At first I was amazed that some of the contestants had been daft enough to bring in shop bought things to add to their celebration cakes. It’s the sort of thing we all do for kids cakes but surely not in a competition! Then I was less than impressed that they all seemed to make their pastry in machines and some of them had never made pastry before. Machine made pastry was not a success. My boys got cookery lessons at school, including hand-made pastry and there was still time for all the academic stuff.

Mind you when they got to the bread making bit I was full of admiration because the couple of times that I’ve tried to bake bread have been disastrous. I couldn’t even have put the results out for the birds because the RSPB would have done me for cruelty! My bread was so heavy the only possible uses for it would have been as doorstops or even anchors.

Anyway if you’re interested in baking, or just looking at food you might like to have a wee keek! They’re starting off with cup/fairy cakes. Kids stuff!

On the Gordon Ferris front – all of his books are out in my local library so he’s obviously popular, I might have to put in some requests.

I hadn’t really expected Andy to win because I just have this feeling that he’ll win Wimbledon next year and brother Jamie will take the doubles title too. It would be great if they could do it because 2012 is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebration year (60 years on the throne) and Virginia Wade managed to win in her Silver Jubilee year. I suppose it’s too much like cloud cuckoo land to hope that there could be a British female winner next year too. Well, I can dream.

So, who am I going to be supporting for the final on Sunday? I haven’t got a clue. I’ll probably just watch out of interest, it means no stress I suppose. I do know that I came quite close to actually hating Nadal today. In the beginning when he was losing he had an arrogant look on his face which seemed to say – How dare he try to beat me! Psychologically I suppose that’s how you win though. Maybe Andy should practice arrogant looks in his mirror!

I’ve been enjoying watching all of the coverage on the TV and tonight I’ve been voting for my favourite gardens in the two categories of show garden and small garden. It was quite difficult because sonetimes I really like the planting of a garden but for me it’s spoiled by a horrendous monstrosity of a modern structure. Like the big white thing in Ishihara Kazuyuki Design Lab garden. I loved all of the plants and the design apart from that weird structure. I ended up voting for the Skyshades garden in the Show Garden category because it is really natural and would be great for wildlife. It only got a silver medal.

In the Small Garden category I opted for Hae-Woo-So (Emptying One’s Mind) from Korea. It got a gold which I think it deserved, lovely plants, water and a rustic structure which turned out to be an outside loo and a place to wash your hands. So it’s about emptying your body too! If you have time take a look at the gardens and let me know which are your favourites.

Still, it could have been a lot worse and let’s face it, it often has been a lot worse. The only way the UK could be placed any higher nowadays would be if we got enormous tow ropes and dragged this island of ours over to mainland Europe so that we would have some borders with them. The rest of the countries always give their neighbours the highest points.

I call it ungrateful, especially when you think that if it wasn’t for us (and the Americans and Russians) they would all be speaking German, the ones that survived anyway. I suppose there must be a statute of limitations on gratitude and I’m just holding on to a grudge too long!

Have a look/listen if you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about. I think London looks quite good in it but you wouldn’t have got me on top of that building for anything.

It was set in Glasgow in 1982 and everything was so recognisably of that time, it was quite nostalgic really. Paddy Meehan’s home brought it all back, white pyrex dishes and all – now very collectable btw!

Has anybody read the book? I read Denise Mina’s Still Midnight recently and although I love crime fiction (but not the gory type) and Glasgow so the book should have been an all round winner for me, somehow it failed to hit the spot. It didn’t have that sense of place which for me is the signature of Scottish writers, very weird when you consider what a strong character the city of Glasgow has.

Can anybody recommend a Denise Mina book which I should try reading?