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G's homemade tomato soup.

He first made this a couple of weeks ago, and it was absolutely delicious. However, no matter how much I nag, on the rare occasions when he cooks he will not either use a recipe or write it down when he has experimented. This means that no matter how delicious it may have been, we are unlikely to ever get that particular dish again. He is currently trying to recreate the first successful batch as this is what he will make for our Christmas dinner.

The plan is; G's tomato soup, prawn cocktails made by me ( I hate seafood, and never eat it, so while everyone is getting tucked into that I can be preparing to dish up the main course) followed by a ham cooked by his Mum, and turkey cooked by me.

My Mum will bring a home-made Clootie dumpling (mmmm - my special treat), and we will have a shop-bought Pavlova or similar for a lighter pudding. After which, I would like to say, we will all have a snooze on the sofa before our guests announce their departure and make their way home.

EXCEPT - G dropped a bombshell on me yesterday, after a telephone call with his Mum. "Oh" says he, "I may have forgotten to mention something to you".

"Oh, what was that"? said I.

"Mm, I invited my family to stay over on Christmas Day, and they have said they will", said he.

At that point, several cataclysmic scenarios were instantly enacted in my imagination. All of them ended badly, mostly with me screaming and G lying in a pool of blood on the floor. However, I managed to pull myself together and smiling sweetly through gritted teeth I growled asked "And where exactly did you imagine they were all going to sleep"?

We have a tiny house; I say tiny, I mean miniscule. It has 2 bedrooms, and we like to sleep in one of them. It has 1 bathroom, and no ensuite. We have no diningroom, and my kitchen measures 7' x 9'.

He said "I thought Mum and Dad could have the spare room and B&S (brother and son) could sleep in the livingroom, one on the sofa and one on the put-u-up on the floor".

In my head this translates as: "The male members of my family will stay up most of the night drinking lovely whisky and beer, and having noisy laughs, and then they will lie about like corpses most of Boxing Day so that you cannot go into the livingroom or relax in a long hot bath".

I do find it hard to understand why G has a tendency to assume that our house has elastic walls; he particularly does this when we have BBQ's - inviting unfeasible numbers of people to doss down on our livingroom carpet or to pitch tents on the grass.

My coping strategy for this 24-hour period is to try to avoid being in a room with him for more than 30 seconds. If I just keep moving I won't be able to simmer and explode! And I just keep telling myself, I won't drink, and then when I take my Mum home I might just forget to come back again!

Ho, Ho, Ho .........