As you’re here – and because part of this dovetails with the grief blog – I’d like to point you in the direction of the Annual Billy Blagg Advent Calendar of Christmas Songs, although I’d imagine this might serve you better if this is around or approaching December time. It won’t stand up so well at Easter or in June.

Based on an old concept whereby I used to swap C90 cassette tapes with friends on which we placed as many terrible Christmas records as we could find, I started the blog on MySpace – How quaint! But it was the accepted music medium then – in 2007 and, rather like the Blagg football column (or because of it) it gained a large number of keen followers.

The remit is I post one Christmas song every day from December 1st to December 25th. These can be of varying quality and I’ll freely admit the original idea of finding awful songs faded many years ago. I now try to find as many obscure good ones as bad ones, but I’m not beyond dipping into the normal canon from time to time either.

I was faced with a huge issue in December 2018 when I had to decide if I should do my annual blog and what effect it would have on me at a enormously emotional time of year. A time that was meant a lot to Gail and I and one which we made sure we celebrated in full every year.

After initial reluctance I decided to start it but warned that it may never finish. As it was, under wonderful support from all over the world, the Calendar seemed to gain wings and finished on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with two songs that could have been written specifically for me that year. I genuinely felt the Calendar helped me survive that first Christmas without Gail.

To go to the specific 2018 email you’d need to link to https://blaggadventcalendarchristmassongs2018.blogspot.com/

But I’ve opened a new web page for future years and you can find that here at https://www.billyblaggsannualadventcalendarofchristmassongs.co.uk/

Oh and Merry Christmas!