A short curmudge

Littlebrowndog's great blog brought me out in such a rash of fellow feeling I thought I would have a very short curmudge myself. Annoying things about Christmas:

1. Supermarkets heaving with people shopping for a month's siege instead of two days. Stop it. People are starving. It is all just going to go off.
2. Idiots queueing at 5.00am on Boxing Day for the Next sale. Haven't they just had a load of stuff?
3. They need more stuff?
4. Christmas lights on houses to rival Blackpool illuminations. Haven't they heard of global warming? How non-essential can you get? Turn it off.
5. Articles in Sunday supplements suggesting the perfect present at £299.99. Excuse me?
6. The first of the nine lessons where Adam says "It was the woman who tempted me" or words to that effect. Grow up. Be a man. Take responsibility.
7. Slade's Merry Christmas shouting at me in shops. Turn it down. Turn it off.
8. The fact that my husband always gets just a little bit cross when we have got to the bit I like: Christmas dinner.
9. No gardening programmes on the telly. I get withdrawal symptons.
10. Wet and wind instead of snow and cold.

However on Boxing Day I got a really ace Christmas present: the first deep brown and beautiful egg from my exultant and noisy Welsummer hen.

A short lull

Well everyone came and ate and went and here we are with a short lull in the proceedings until the next lot come tomorrow.

I quite like the little interludes. We had twelve for dinner on Christmas Day and rather too many people to seat and feed, although none of the visitors seemed to mind. As is often the case, having planned the food carefully, the best meal of the three days of festive food was on Christmas Eve: Guinness-baked ham, parmesan roast potatoes with fennel and orange salad followed by lemon tart or Chocolate brioche bread and butter pudding, both the puddings made by my mother. Yum.

The best part of the Christmas day meal for me was, as it often is, the stuffing, a cranberry and chestnut stuffing roll, wrapped in bacon. As always I cooked sprouts but carefully avoided eating any, the prerogative of age. I never did get to like them through trying them, even decades on. My father believes this is because I never tried enough and gave up trying when I was about twenty; clearly just a lightweight with no real commitment to sprout consumption.

Today we have checked all the apples hanging up in the workshop and, somewhat to my surprise, having checked the freezer I have ended up making chutney with some ageing garden produce so the kitchen is full of the smell of brown sugar and vinegar. That wasn't part of the plan. So I had better go and check it and survey the last sad wreckage of Christmas food in the fridge. From tomorrow we are allowed to start afresh!

Hope you all had a good day. No need to get back to work just yet!

A moment's calm

I stopped work for Christmas yesterday and here I am with presents to wrap, food shopping to do and cards to deliver. But for an hour or so this morning I have decided to be still. Soon the house will be full of people and noise but this morning it is quiet. Overnight there has been a hard, hard frost and the valley glitters white in the pale winter sun. Behind the ridge on the far side of the valley the sky is pure and pale.

Although the sun is bright the air is still clear and cold and the bird feeders are thronged with birds comng and going, now great tits, now bluetits, now chaffinches. Yesterday I looked out of the kitchen window and thought "My god, there is an eagle in the walnut tree." Just fifty yards away, the walnut tree is over the fence of the side garden just in front of Ian's workshop. Of course it wasn't an eagle, it was a buzzard, but it stayed huge, beautiful, a wild visitor from another world, for fifteen minutes or so. Its feather markings were clear and strong in my field glasses.

Tomorrow the cold will be gone, the forecasters say, and I will miss it, so this morning I have wandered the garden. Last week we had some bare rooted plants delivered: hawthorn and blackthorn to extend the kitchen garden hedge, osier willow to try to grow my own shoots to make a willow igloo for the field (we take a long term view of life up here), rosa rugosa for the edge of the drive and Roseraie de l'Haye to plant in a big curve beyond the swing. We heeled them in, waiting for time to prepare and plant. Today the earth is, as the song says, hard as iron, water like a stone. No planting this week.

From the garden I can hear the cock calling, bossing his hens busily. The cats are on the cushion in the sun on the kitchen windowsill. There is nowhere on earth I would rather be than here, now.

A letter to myself

SBS tagged me to write a letter to my thirteen year old self. Hmm, what a self conscious mess she was. Here goes:

Dear Liz
I wanted to let you know a few things I wish I had known when I was thirteen. I don't suppose you will listen to me because I'm you and I know what you are like.

1. One day you will go out with the older brother of your best friend for whom you have been nursing a passion for months. Eventually you will find him boring and dump him. Incredible eh?

2. There really is no need to shave the fair downy hair on your legs.

3. Your legs, downy or otherwise, are lovely. So is all of you.

4. Your six year old sister, currently either invisible to you or a pain, will become your best friend and lifelong support.

5. One day you will stop blushing (most of the time).

6. Even if you do blush, one day you will be able to speak in front of five hundred people.

7. It really would be a good idea to put aside your fear of looking stupid and learn to skate and ski. If you don't do it now, it's not going to happen.

8. One day you will realise you love your step dad.

9. Do not be afraid, and if you can't help it, act anyway. Courage, the greatest of the virtues, without which the others cannot be practised.

10. Much of life is complicated, messy and hard. It is therefore vital to notice when you are having a good time and to live the good bits with unbridled enthusiasm.

11. Quite a lot of stuff doesn't matter. Smile, treat others as you want them to treat you. Never hold a grudge.

12. If in doubt, go for a walk and have a bit of chocolate.

13. Have a great time.

Well go on, get on with it.

much love
yourself.


And now I would like to tag:

Milla
Suffolkmum
@themill
Fennie
Pipany

if you have the time or the inclination.

Christmas shopping

Well, I've done it. For the first time ever in my life I have done all my Christmas shopping with three weeks to go. At least that is the theory. Sadly when I spread everything out all over the bed with my list by my side I discover that what I have actually done is buy a lot of things for me and for people who are like me.

Damn it. I always do something like this. I have a general cheery sense in the run up to Christmas that there are quite a number of people to buy for who have very similar likes and dislikes to mine: both older and younger daughter, my mother, my sister. Then, to a slightly lesser extent but still within the comfort zone, my daughter in law and my older niece. So out I go, or in I sit at the computer, and wander around shops or cyberspace thinking "That's an interesting book. Ooh, lovely little evening bag. Mmm, heritage seeds and here's a garden diary. Gorgeous embroidered cushion. Cath Kidston slippers. Provencal soaps. More books. Gossamer scarf. Oh this is easy, no problem."

And then I really look at what I have bought and see that it is:
1. pretty exclusively female
2. quite hard to give away because it is all stuff I like
3. no good at all for my dad, my brother, my son in law.

I can in fact make myself give away some of this lovely stuff to all the female members of my lovely family because I know they will like it too but it still doesn't help with the perennially difficult people. My Dad seems to already have everything he wants but hates to be left out. Ian buys what he wants for himself and then insists that the new chainsaw/router/hedge trimmer is his Christmas present - easy but deeply unromantic. My brother loves sailing and old motor bikes so should in theory be easy to buy for but he seems already to have every sailing gadget under the sun and motor bikes are a mystery to me. My son in law's passions are Japanese, Go (a fiendish Japanese game), poker, basketball and my daughter.

Then there are the emotionally tricky ones: my ex-husband and his wife with whom we are warm but ever so slightly distant friends, where the present clearly has to be for both of them with no undertones of a shared history. My sister in law, whom I rarely see but don't want to cut out of my life altogether. Until they both died in the last few years there was my grandmother, in her nineties with diabetes and failing sight, her lifelong interest in sewing and making things now beyond her, and my childless aunt, insisting on providing presents for my then teenage children who would much have preferred a fiver. Buying for them always seemed to have with it an edge of guilt at my own good health or my own good fortune.

I might just do a lot of food to give away. At least it doesn't add to all the piles of waste going into landfill, another source of guilt these days. In fact, if I give all my menfolk drink and get them to piss on the compost heap they will be happy (if cold) and I will be green (with an accelerated compost heap).

Genius.