Lights... camera... action! But not in a good way.

My Christmas kitchen (homemade mince pies etc sadly just out of shot.)

Last week, I made cranberry-studded mincemeat for mince pies and crab cakes following Nigella recipes (for the record, the mincemeat's yum and the crab cakes need a couple of egg yolks to stop them completely falling apart in the pan) and today I got my fairy lights up in the kitchen. Yaysies!

I used Command Strips Decorating Clips, the packaging and leftover bits of which are ably demonstrated here by my glamorous and recently groomed assistant:


I'd none of the isopropyl alcohol mcsomething something that they recommend wiping surfaces with before getting busy with Command Strip products, but sure I slung them up on top of the cornicing anyway - they've worked grand for me before without using it, like.

I left the strips to cure for an hour and a half, admiring how blinvisible they were from the ground and thinking that I'd be able to leave them up all year, before carefully clipping the lights onto them. Everything was lovely and twinkly for about 10 minutes or thereabouts while I took a photee and thought about having some mulled wine. Then I started to hear little "ping!" noises and, sure enough, half the Command Strips had gone AWOL and the fecking lights were hanging down the fronts of the cabinets. (Not quite as disastrous as my first attempt to hang them last week, when I thought that I'd just need double-sided sticky tape to hold them up and they ended up in the middle of the dinner.)

Le sigh.