Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it's our last
..and all through the house, not a creature was stirring 'cept the Dog, fucking soused.

'Twas the night before Christmas...

Here we are, then. Another Burglar's Dog Christmas. Another chance for us to wish you compliments of the season, and to rant about all the fucking terrible things about drinking in Newcastle upon Tyne over the past twelve months.

Before we start our seasonal pissy whine, we'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support and bewilderment, and light a candle for internet search engines for somehow sticking us near the top of "newcastle pubs" results, even though we're far and away the most useless and poorly informed site on the information superhighway. Fuck us pink and purple and call us a bauble, we haven't got the faintest idea of what we're on about half the time, have we?

But hey! Just because we wish we were dead every time we venture out on the town; just because we flounce off home in tears of anger and dismay whenever we see a hen night; just because we're far too old and tired to be doing this any more, it doesn't mean we can't go a-wassailing with the best of 'em. Of course it doesn't, whatever wassailing entails.

So let's have a small sherry for the insanity of 24 hour drinking and the greedy fuckers in the industry who think absolute carnage is fine as long as profits are on the up and up. Let's raise a glass to the poor bleary eyed sods stuck behind a bar at four in the morning for £3.75 an hour, praying that self-same glass doesn't end up in their eye socket.

Roast chestnuts on an open fire for all the pools of vomit decorating our fine city, for all the shattered bus shelters and discarded kebabs, and for all our lovely citizens doing the headlock hoe-down into the back of the cop van. And can we have three cheers for all those hours of unplanned overtime by the nightshift staff of A&E departments throughout the land? Hip hip! Hooray!

Bring out the figgy pudding for the over saturated pub market and pour on the clotted cream of another tacky "fun" pub biting the dust within six months of opening. Kiss us under the mistletoe as we celebrate the continued dominance of cod-luxurious wank over history and tradition. Who the fuck needs authenticity when they can have a theme bar trying to recreate what was thrown away in the first place?

Pull a cracker for our festive favourite furnishing oxymoron, contemporary retro. Let's don a paper hat for all the purple paint lovingly splashed around our city's bars. Ooh! You got me mauve! It's just what I've always wanted!

Ding dong merrily on high for the latest influx of new teenage drinkers on our streets, stupider and more unruly than the one before. Let's baste our turkeys to the plummeting price of cocaine, and its tremendous work in turning arrogant gobshite wankers into even bigger wankers than ever. And let's have a wee dram afore ye go for society and humanity as a whole, for being so undeniably piss poor that there's simply no option but to get off one's Yuletide tits on whatever intoxicants are within reach.

We sincerely wish you all the very best for the Christmas and New Year period and hope and pray, from the bottom of our broken hearts, that nobody takes advantage of licensing leniency to kick your fucking teeth out for looking at their taxi. We mean it. We do.

What about us? What have we got planned? Fuck all, really. Another Christmas Eve staying in to dodge the rain, another family misunderstanding-cum-punchup on the big day, another Boxing Day with our head down the bowl.

And as for the New Year, what hollow promises have we made for The Burglar's Dog? Well, we've finally gone broadbandtastic, and we've told our lass it's either a new digital camera come Christmas morning, or the divorce lawyers the instant their offices reopen, so you can look forward to a thorough spring clean of the entire site and all its mouldy reviews.

Then again, we might just jack the whole thing in.

Love and that

The Burglar's Dog

xx

Oh aye, if you still haven't had a chance to ignore the Burglar's Dog 2006 Calendar, you can find the link to it HERE. Told you we'd be whoring that shite forever, didn't we?