Well I’m back! I was a bit all over the place over the festive period there, so I’m splitting it into chunks!

Christmas was spent with my family (Mum, Dad, Jill, Ailsa, and Jill’s husband Tobey) at the Westin in Dublin. We’ve stayed in some hotels before over Christmas, and I quite like it. It’s relaxing and totally stress-free (usually!). The Westin was pretty nice but a bit wonky in places in that they didn’t know when things in the hotel were open and closed, and they had letters addressed to the wrong people in our rooms. Overall it was nice though. The Christmas dinner was amazing and they gave us some Molton Brown goodies and champagne as a Christmas present as well!

Apart from chilling out in the hotel, I met up with my friend David who joined the BBC at the same time as me as a trainee and is now making some moula running his own business.

On Boxing Day (or St. Stephen’s Day as it’s called in Ireland, which I didn’t know!) we went to Leopardstown to watch horse racing, which apparently is a bit of a Dublin tradition. It was mobbed, and it was very, very cold. I placed two €10 bets on horses (I totally don’t have a clue about horses / gambling / form etc) and won a total of €21, so at least I was one Euro up. Ailse got all excited when a horse she bet on came in first, but she ended up down overall, so that kind of ruined it!

Overall it was a very relaxing and nice Christmas – hope yours was good too!