Southampton wins the Christmas countdown
Lights on in city centre: OCTOBER 29.

I wish I was joking, but the lights on the trees and atop the Bargate ruins could not be mistaken for anything else. (I should note this was relatively small-scale, and the official switch-on is probably a way off, but there were certainly some there.)

In other news, what bought me to the city centre was karaoke at the badly-located but not-that-bad Royal Oak. The playlist is massive, coming to literally hundreds of pages. There's even room for musical theatre songs, and better yet Defying Gravity is not one of them. (Yet.)

It would help if the songs were as advertised, though. After much thinking and consideration (and a very, very strong temptation to go for the song the choir was meant to perform but never did, You Must Love Me - yes, that was there, albeit in whatever arrangement the film musical was using for Madonna) I opted for - for some reason - Linkin Park's endearingly teen-angsty Numb (not to be confused with the even better Pet Shop Boys song of that name, the best thing Diane Warren ever wrote).

I got the hybrid of that and some nonsense by Jay-Zee. Fortunately I had heard said hybrid before, and opted to go all-out for a few minutes of nonsense. All inhibitions went for two verses of not-that-bad-actually rapping, and the singing actually disappointed in comparison. Very, very odd. But one to remember.

Next week, though, something else. Might be one of the musical theatre pieces the choir's done - Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again is there too - might be something totally different. (Might be It's Oh So Quiet - different crowd, remember.)