final preparations

With the rain last night came the wind.  We went for supper with my parents, and the sound of it gusting around the end of the house and over the conservatory took me back to childhood.  Except that then we lived in a stone built Victorian house on top of a hill, exposed to the full blast of the Devon south-westerlies, and when it blew hard the wind didn't just shriek, the whole house thrummed, like a sailing boat pushed hard in a stiff blow.  Driving home, as we turned into the road leading to our lane we saw blue flashing lights ahead of us.  This did not bode well, and I was afraid that there must have been a collision on the blind corner where our farm lane turns off.  Instead it turned out that there was a tree down across the road, and the police were on the scene.  We had to turn round and go the other way round the block, a detour of about three miles to cover about 500 yards.

This morning, going down to the village for emergency supplies of butter (one packet in the fridge turned out to be best before a date in late November, and did taste as though it had better be used to make bird food and not mince pies), the lane was already clear, with great piles of sawdust on each side of the road to show where the fallen tree had been, and some impressive lumps of timber in the ditch.  Our neighbour has lost a holm oak from his garden.  It was a fine looking tree, and the foliage didn't look sparse or diseased, at least to the casual eye passing by.  Lucky it didn't fall on anybody.

I have laid out the red cloth, and the white lace one, and the large lantern, and made a wreath to go round the base of the lantern using a loop of ivy strands tied together with red raffia, decorated with holly, fruiting ivy, the great coral coloured fruits of the rose 'Meg', and sprays of little apples from the crab apple 'Red Sentinel'.  The Systems Administrator has twiddled white flashing lights up the banisters, and woven holly and ivy through them, and piled greenery and rose hips on the mantelpiece.  The SA's mother was Welsh, and the SA, normally a highly rational and definitely non-superstitious being, is adamant that the greenery must not be brought into the house until Christmas Eve.  Otherwise something bad happens, though I'm not sure what.

I have made mince pies.  It is a very long time since I made them, since last year I made a stollen (which was unexpectedly successful) and that looked so large that mince pies as well seemed de trop.  This year's pies are made with a jar of mincemeat bought last Christmas and never opened.  The year before that I made a fruit cake, finally discovering at about the third attempt how to cook a fruit cake all the way through in an Aga without burning the outside (there are several ovens, but their temperatures are not adjustable, so it is impossible to bake anything at a temperature between about 100 degrees C and approximately 180 degrees).  The answer turns out to be that you cook it for a very, very long time at a cooler temperature than I would ever have believed you could cook a cake at.  By the time it was iced it looked like a lot of cake, and the SA doesn't eat Christmas cake, so mince pies seemed excessive then as well.  So it is about three years since I made them, and I couldn't remember what depth tins I used, or what sized cutters for either the bases or the lids.  The filling hasn't run over the lids, so that is all right, though they are a rather odd shape.  Then I made cheese straws, and cut them out using a star shaped pastry cutter, as it's Christmas, instead of just cutting the pastry into rectangles with a sharp knife like I do for the music society nibbles.

At 3.00 it will be time for the festival of nine lessons and carols, and soon after that it will be time for a glass of sherry and a cheese star.  Merry Christmas, everybody.

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.