Saturday morning and the tree is in. Cora and I bought it last week from Church Farm  late in the afternoon as the sun started to close down and a grey milky light lay on the South side of the Wirral. It spent the week in an orange bucket round the back of the house. I thought it might enjoy the cold and the wet for a few more days before being brought into the dry and hung with baubles. Andrea pointed out it might have enjoyed all that more if it still had its roots.

Last night kids were out either babysitting or partying so I turned on BBC4 to see what music might be on offer going on to the early hours. The second half of The Rolling Stones documentary Crossfire Hurricane was starting so I settled down to watch that. It covered some of the glory years from Mick Taylor joining, Madison Square Gardens, Altamont to Ronnie Wood joining and Some Girls – the constants being Mick Jagger’s appalling clothes, Charlie and Bill’s grim faced determination and the stone eyed Keith stare as his thickening fingers beat down on the metal strings of his guitar.

What was frightening was the empty wild faces of the Hell’s Angels at Altamont, Meredith Hunter’s bright green suit leading up to the hedonism and swirl of the audiences in the mid-seventies full of self-regard and the band edging away from that horror.

After that there was a film of The Rolling Stones playing with Muddy Waters at the Checkerboard Club in Chicago. Mick wearing some kind of horrible bright red plastic jump suit hamming it up, Ronnie & Keith at the back with smiles on their faces, Ian Stewart clambering out onto the stage to get to the piano and Muddy Waters at the front calling out the names of the band, his band playing as they had been doing for so many years.