Has anyone else tried the new festive Subway?? Highly recommended! It's like eating leftovers from an Xmas dinner - stuffing, chicken (not turkey), cranberry sauce, cold gravy - and salad - and toasted, with cheese...

For my Festive Reading I was persevering with Stations of the Sun but was beaten back by a combination of minuscule typeface, turgid academic prose and a brain too clogged up with snot and mucus to make any sort of sense of it. Instead I'm on with the latest instalment of the Dandy / Beano restrospective series (a suitably seasonal Winter Games) which I'm reading in tandem with Torn Apart: The Life of Ian Curtis by Mick Middles and Lindsay Reade. In this latter I've just read how Joy Division recorded their debut EP An Ideal for Living in Pennine Sound Studio in Oldham on Boxing day 1978. For sustenance, their then-manager's mother made up a batch of barmcake sarnies using cold Xmas leftovers from the day before - not turkey note, but chicken, as befits our heroes' humble social origins.

Echoes of the Festive Subway perhaps? - although I might despair that barmcake is not one of the bread options on offer! So, here's a festive classic: Leaders of Men recorded on that freezing boxing day in Oldham almost 32 years ago. You can almost smell those Xmas dinner leftovers!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtpyAVzdXVw