the shortest day

I'd assumed that yesterday, 21st December, would be the Solstice, but it turns out that 2011 is one of those years when it slips forward a day, due to the earth's orbit of the sun taking slightly more than 365 days.  Next year the leap year will get it back where it belongs.  Although it was the shortest day it was splendid for gardening, warm, dry, and sunny, and it was a pity that I had to spend the morning shopping for food.  We have steak and chips and a giant portobello mushroom (each) for supper on Christmas Eve, always.  I think this tradition arose when we were still commuting, and wanted something luxurious and celebratory that was easy to cook, and not pork or poultry given the feast to come.  On Christmas Day we have a free range chicken with all the trimmings (except bread sauce.  Can't see the point of the stuff).  We used to dutifully roast a turkey, until deciding that a whole turkey was far too big for two people, and that neither of us particularly liked it anyway.  On Boxing Day evening we have cheese and watch a film.  The list of required foodstuffs is thus very precise, never changes, and we are terribly particular about finding everything on it.

I got the gammon to go with the chicken in Waitrose, because they do nice gammons while the Tesco ones are generally rubbish.  Then I went to Tesco because I know where things are there, and I thought it would be easier.  In Tesco it took me a long time to find any cream that wasn't best before 25 December.  My flexible attitude to best before dates does not extend to cream, because off cream tastes disgusting.  The only fresh orange juice was best before 23 December, and they didn't seem to have any decent cheese, so I had to wrap the frozen chips up in my work coat and go home via Wivenhoe, to get cheese at the deli and see if the Co-op had any longer dated OJ.  It did, also Price's candles, which I wanted to go in the candelabra (it's black painted metal from Ikea.  Don't get too excited).  Tesco seem to have given up selling what they used to describe as bistro candles.  Unwrapping four different cheeses in the deli, and chopping bits off them, and weighing and pricing them, took absolutely ages and there were two people behind me in the queue, and nobody else for them to pay except for the man who was busy serving me with cheese.  You can see why supermarkets took off, occasional stock glitches notwithstanding, although the Wivenhoe deli does do very good cheese, and stocks Oud Amsterdam, which I'm especially partial to.

I did wonder how it was that I was trecking around the grocers of north Essex while the Systems Administrator was eating potted cheese in a City chop house with some old mates, but given that I won't play any part in cooking the lunch, apart from making the rum butter and maybe offering to peel the sprouts, it only seemed fair.  And I get very neurotic if we don't have the right kind of stuffing, so it's probably better if I buy it.  There was one year we found we'd bought redcurrant jelly instead of cranberry sauce, which was a blow, but I was very careful today.

It was a pleasure and a relief to go out into the wood after lunch with the secateurs, saw and pickaxe, and get on with tackling the brambles and the rhododendron stumps.  I got one stump out, but that was an easy one.  I think a branch had layered itself at some point, and the root system wasn't all that substantial.  The stump I'm stuck into now is a real monster.  I've sawed through several side roots, and dug a 30cm trench all round it, and I can still barely rock it in the hole.  I haven't counted the others, but there are several to go after this one, possibly hraia (a very large number, more than five), or even funfty.