High noon

My day began in near-darkness, as I left the house at 8.05am to do the shopping before the hordes of maskless plague victims did too much breathing in Morrison’s. (Have I got that right? That’s sort of what I took from Jason Leitch’s latest advice…). It was still almost dark, but it was dry and mild and I got all the messages back indoors without any rain.

It has, however, rained almost steadily since then. And it’s been unbearably gloomy, so that you could believe it was still perhaps pre-sunrise. Maybe the sun has gone AWOL in the heavens. Perhaps our planet’s orbit wavered in the night …

So, instead of going on with speculative miserable guff like the above, I’m going to share something I was thinking at lunchtime, as I caught up on a Food supplement from a pre-Christmas Sunday paper which I didn’t have time to read when it appeared. And what got my figurative goat was the pronouncement in one foodie person’s piece that her family had “moved on” from the traditional Christmas Dinner. She then went on to describe how to assemble a duck, lentils, radicchio (I loathe radicchio), pasta, shellfish, quince, pastry, marzipan … there was more, but memory, thankfully, fails me. This lot was all to make sure the unfortunates on whom she inflicted it wouldn’t miss … roast potatoes. I ask you.

So, from me: Ewan (my chef/aka son), I love every bit of your Christmas dinner. I love that the turkey is big enough to give us two delicious full dinners before providing you (after we’ve moved on) with sandwiches, soup and so on. I love your roast spuds, your superior pigs in blankets, your fabby stuffing, your roasted veg, that dollop of beetroot purée. As for the Christmas pudding, developed from your great-Grandmother’s recipe? Fantastic. And flamed to perfection. Don’t ever try to change it - not while I’m alive anyway. I may even go on making the gravy…

Thing is, it’s once a year. ONCE. How often do you eat, say, eggs in a year? Or sandwiches? Why on earth would you want to remove turkey as a meal? When I was a child, we had a chicken as a Christmas treat - I think they may have been more expensive than the beef or lamb we might usually have at the weekend. I never had a turkey until I cooked my first Christmas dinner in my early 30s. And the cranberry sauce, made by my own fair hand, is a much later addition, of which I still have a couple of spoonfuls to grace a burger at the weekend. There is a quarter of my Christmas cake left, and a handful of mince pies - and there is another spoonful of brandy butter to help them on their way. 

There. That’s the rant I never wrote to the newspaper. You’re reading it instead. Or rolling your eyes and skipping past. Either way, it’s still the season of unremitting joy and I’m going to have a mince pie …