We went to a Christmas party yesterday afternoon. In London. Four until seven, one welcoming glass of fizz on arrival, then smoked salmon nibbles and cucumber sandwiches, leading into tea and cakes. The hostess was my old university friend, brought up in Germany, and the cakes were excellent. She comes from Wuppertal, where they really know how to do cake.
She's been holding the Christmas tea party for years. Once upon a time, her father used to dress up as Father Christmas for the benefit of her little daughter and the other children, who rushed around in great excitement, wearing party frocks that were far prettier than any of my dresses. Nowadays, her daughter is a polite teenager, and the youngsters have their own quiet celebration in the privacy of her bedroom, while the oldies congregate below. One of the former child guests is now in his final year at Balliol, and no longer goes to tea parties with his parents. The guests are a mixture of former colleagues, neighbours, and other university friends, many of whom have also been going to the Christmas tea since its inception, so we have the strange connectedness of people who are happy to chat once a year, without ever having struck up an independent friendship outside the shared occasion of the tea.
There is an interesting mixture of people who are retired and glad of it, some who still work a bit but no longer regard it as the be-all and end-all, and those who remain fiercely competitive and work-focussed. I can't contribute much to conversations with the latter. If they remember anything about what I do, or did, they tend to think that I am a garden designer. I never have been, but I suppose design scores more highly in the middle class pecking order than hands-on horticultural work.
My friends' parents, over from Germany for ten days, are always pleased to see me, and the other familiar faces. They remember that I keep bees, and the name of our most forthcoming cat, who has been obliging in the past about letting their animal-mad grand-daughter fuss over him. My friend is an only child, living a short haul flight away from them in what is, at least to her mother, a foreign city. I think they find it comforting to think that she has friends there of long standing.
We haven't been every year. When we both still worked, and the party was on a week day, there was a year when it was logistically impossible. Two years it snowed and the trains packed up. Last year she didn't ask us, I think worrying that it was too far to expect people to travel for tea, then this year she decided to simply invite us, and not second guess our feelings about travel. With the overground from Stratford running every ten minutes on the North London loop, Islington is actually easier to reach than many parts of London, as long as it isn't snowing. Originally we were going to make a day of it, and have lunch in the Systems Administrator's new favourite Turkish restaurant in Upper Street, before deciding we'd been out quite a lot, and would save that for another day.
Today we are hosting a Christmas lunch, having invited my parents, brother and his family over. Because we were out for half of yesterday for the tea party, they are getting ready made food. Sorry about that, folks. We generally cook for guests from scratch. That's partly because we generally cook from scratch anyway. Maybe because I equate cooking with caring (though in that case the SA cares much more for me than I do for the SA). Because I am frugal, and find it vaguely disturbing to pay £3.75 for about thirty pence worth of ingredients. And I reckon my home-made puddings are better than shop ones, ditto my flans. And when you have two people and five hens you are looking for any opportunity you can find to use some eggs. And I like the ritual of the day before the party, making pastries, assembling the giant retro salad from a 1970s American vegetarian cookery book (you will never see anything like it anywhere else, but everybody eats it). Given a full day in the kitchen I can produce a two course buffet for sixty people (on which basis I am never going to make my fortune in the catering trade).
Anyway, there wasn't time to do all that, and the point is to see people over Christmas, not cook for them. The SA is out as I type, to buy fresh bread, and cat food, where stocks are dangerously low. I just hope the queues at the Co-op aren't too long. For the guests to arrive before the host would be embarassing.
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