APOLOGIES from my family and I if you experienced a slight fluctuation in your electricity supply on Sunday.

You see it was around that time we were switching on the D’Arcy-Jones Christmas illumination display, which as the years have gone by, has got bigger and bigger.

This year I wasn’t really involved in the decorations – I was at church taking part in what I think is the best part of Christmas, the traditional carol service.

Our church tends to do these things a little more grandiosely than most, so we had a Nine Lessons service complete with carols and anthems, sung only by the choir.

Of all the anthems I was pretty pleased to see Guadete on the list. A huge hit for Steeleye Span back in the Seventies and a firm favourite on the festive compilation album, I love to sing along to it while I’m basting the turkey.

But it’s a bit different singing it in a proper choir.

As an ex-lawyer, the extent of my Latin is fairly limited to legal maxims, so whizzing through the tenor line while trying to enunciate such words as Christus et natus, and ex maria virgine, was a bit tricky.

I was in a pretty jolly, yuletide mood when I arrived home from the Nine Lessons to find the house bedecked in the kind of light show you might find on the Blackpool Strip.

It was the gift of light that kept on giving.

Not one, but two Christmas trees had rows of lights sprinkled about the pine needles, as did pretty much every other nook and cranny of the house.

New for this year are two wiggly strands of what I like to call “fairground lights” the BW and children have draped over the tops of the kitchen and utility room doors.

To add to this electronic light show – because obviously hundreds of light bulbs just don’t say Christmas enough in our house – candles have been neatly positioned across the fireplace.

Readers may remember from last year my worry about the candles the BW had placed next to our crib scene, complete with highly-flammable hay, and so we have a battery-powered lantern this year.

The fact it is actually larger than the crib scene itself obviously wasn’t discussed in the design process, but hey, we all won’t be potentially going up in flames this year – so that’s a good thing.

Even the dog has his own portable light show and I have to say it’s my favourite of the lot.

No, we haven’t drapped Ludo in fairy lights (although...).

He has a new bouncy ball which lights up fluorescent green whenever he picks it up, or drops it, or rolls it around the floor with his paws.

Imagine a furry hound running around a house with something that looks a little like it might have been picked up from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant around 1986.

Because nothing says Christmas like a cocker spaniel with a piece of radioactive waste material in his mouth.

Happy Christmas everyone and a prosperous New Year!