Made a festive visit to Sludge's abode yesterday prior to our annual grog supping in boozers along the town's High Street. I swore following his antics in earlier years that I wouldn't accompany him again as there's merit in the adage about being judged by the company you keep. I relented but donned a Covid mask, dark glasses and a floppy hat to disguise my identity when we walked the streets.

Beforehand the cheapskate offered his pitifully familiar seasonal hospitality. Once again I gazed at a lonely and forlorn looking mince pie. It looked remarkably like, and probably was, the same one I declined 12 months earlier. The small glass of what he claimed was Aldi's finest Botswanian sherry also remained untouched.

As with every year he had convinced himself the ale houses would be teeming with naive office workers, or "soppy tarts" in his words, unused to strong liquor. "There'll be loads of fanny available," he kept repeating while cackling and rubbing his hands together in gleeful anticipation.

When we neared the shopping area he stopped to catch hold of my arm. Pointing directly at a 30-something woman 20 yards away walking in our direction: "look at the tits on that!" he exclaimed at the top of his lungs. She had a huge pair of udders on her, fair play, but I felt I had to admonish his vulgar sexist remarks. "Why not say prominent chest or generous bosom?" I asked. He looked at me as if I was an alien.

Close to the first pub we headed to - the Vale of Glamorgan - a small throng had gathered so we stopped to have a nose. An elderly white-haired fella holding a large crucifix skyward was warning about what awaited those who submitted to moral dissolution and especially "sinners" who practiced fornication. "They will burn in Hell for eternity," he wailed authoritatively. Sludge asked me what fornicate means. "Sex outside marriage," I replied. "Sounds like I'm totally fecked, then," the dirty dogger whispered.

That pub, to his great disappointment, like the other two we visited, had no women of the type who dominate his vivid imagination that's preoccupied with vigorous, unabated nookie sessions. Instead they were filled with local males. I.e. - grasping, money-obsessed, Tory-loving shysters, the same ones he prefers to characterise as, à la Neil Warnock, "my kind of people."

It appears even during this Christian festival he's committed to remaining an unadulterated rotter of considerable notoriety.