The lunch went off pretty smoothly. The miniature sausages were a sad disappointment, refusing to turn brown and sizzle even in a hot oven, they merely exuded juice while remaining resolutely grey and flabby. We decided to leave them out, given that there seemed to be plenty of other food. Wrapped in tinfoil and stashed away in the fridge, the Systems Administrator will try using them tonight as the basis of a toad-in-the-hole. The Thai spicy meatballs were a hit, and the cheese souffles were pronounced very cheesy. The miniature filo tarts were the least popular, which is fair enough, as they came out of the oven mysteriously damp, and looked it. The apple strudel tasted great, and after I'd first let the top catch and then failed to decant it from the tinfoil tray in one piece, it looked so knackered it could easily have been homemade. Kate Reddy distressing shop-bought mince pies with a rolling pin had nothing on it.
The children behaved absolutely impeccably. They sat down to eat their lunch, talked to the grown-ups, played with the cats, and spontaneously offered to help clear the table, then asked if they could go and play in the garden. I told them not to drown themselves in the pond and to keep out of the wood, because there was an unsafe fallen tree, and my mother kept a discreet eye on them under the guise of taking a cigarette break, but they were fine. They seemed happy running about, decorating the SA's secret deck with twigs, and waving a long bamboo pruning outside the dining room window.
It is not a particularly dangerous garden, but neither is it designed to be safe for children, and I can think of several ways a determined child could come unstuck. It would be very easy to climb on to the conservatory roof, for starters, since the conservatory is fifteen feet downhill of the house, putting the top of its roof at the same level as the ground floor window sills. I don't know whether the polycarbonate sandwich is up to carrying the weight of a ten year, but if it isn't, it's a good thirteen foot drop on to concrete below. I think my brother's wife was more worried about what damage the children might do to the garden, but I assured her that really, at this time of the year, unless they were armed with pruning equipment there was very little they could do.
The cats behaved beautifully as well. Our Ginger is always good with visitors, to the point where he has been mentioned by name in several Christmas cards. Even my London German friend's father asks after Our Ginger. However, the big anxious tabby normally vanishes as soon as visitors arrive, and yesterday he allowed himself to be stroked and looked positively amiable, as far as a yard long stone of dribbling,bony Maine Coon with a hardwired expression of acute anxiety ever can look amiable. My younger niece said without conviction that he had tried to eat her hand, but I promised her that he hadn't, and that he must like her since he normally ran away from visitors.
Only the fat indignant tabby refused to play. She disappeared from her box in the hall as soon as anyone other than us came in through the front door, as is her custom. Normally she reappears within a quarter of an hour of visitors leaving, but yesterday there was still no sign of her after several hours. She didn't seem to be anywhere in the study, or answer when called from the doorstep, and a quick inspection of places she might conceivably have got locked in revealed nothing. Finally, at gone seven, she flounced through the hall, paused to glare at me, and vanished for the rest of the evening. She must have been hiding and sulking in the study until then, before deciding to make a break for it. In the morning there she was, sitting by the food dishes, still looking faintly disapproving. We can't not ask people round because it upsets the cat.
This morning I did The Big Shop. The SA was initially intent on going, as cook and officer in charge of food shopping, but I volunteered. This was partly out of altruism, since the SA doesn't want to be pushing a laden trolley around with a cracked rib. It was also a calculated plan to preserve domestic harmony. I am terribly fussy about what we have, much more so than the SA, and thought that if anyone didn't get the right stuffing, or enough of the right kind of cheese, or the wrong kind of biscuits, it had better be me, then there would be no recriminations as I'd have only myself to blame. There was a year I managed to pick up red currant jelly instead of cranberry sauce, and the SA was remarkably forbearing about it, which is partly due to the SA's sweet nature, and also because the SA doesn't especially like cranberry sauce. I am fanatically keen on everything being exactly the same as it always is. The Carr's water biscuits must be plain, and on no account have added black pepper, though this year I am lobbying for the addition of a roast onion along with the sprouts and carrots. I did pretty well, except that I had to settle for chestnut mushrooms for Christmas eve supper instead of the large portobello ones, and when I got home the SA commented that I had bought politically incorrect dates. I didn't notice they were from the Israeli occupied West Bank. Oh dear.
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