What is out on Christmas Day?

A brave yellow rose blooming against the cottage wall.

The hammamelis mollis. Every year it takes me by surprise. For weeks it is an undistinguished little tree in the corner of the field and then one day it is full of gorgeous spidery blossoms with a clear sweet scent.

The new White Wyandotte hens out for a scratch and a wander.

A tiny pink flower on the scented geranium, protected by being just under the canopy of the yew tree on the edge of a sunny wall.

Here we go again.

Christmas again and how am I doing? It has galloped towards me over the last few days. I like a balance between being prepared (so as not to be too frantic) and having things to do (so as to have what frances calls "a bit of Tizz"). This year there has been too much work and procrastination and not enough preparation so I am skating towards it in a slithery out of control rush, consoling myself that on Christmas Day it is just the two of us this year so I can save the major planning for a houseful at New Year. But here is the list of things to do:

Cake - made but not iced although this morning I doused it once again with brandy. The kitchen smells intensely alcoholic. I have also been faffing around today trying to find my favourite recipe for marzipan. For years I thought I hated marzipan but eventually discovered that what I hate is shop bought, over sweet for me marzipan. The home made stuff I adore. So that is another job, but one well worth doing.

Puddings - made, wrapped in foil, sitting in the pantry on the cold slab.

Cards - halfway there. Writing cards is one of my least favourite jobs but getting cards with no message in is always such a disappointment. The answer is to give myself enough time to write a few sentences to the people I don't see very often rather than leave it so late that the whole job has to be done in one resentful rush. I had a couple of years when I was by myself when I sent no cards at all but over the last few years I have come back round to sending them again. This is helped by the fact that Ian is one of those rare men who writes his own.

Tree - well, yes, not yet.

Decorating the house - ditto. We live in such a beautiful place that it is impossible to make the inside look more lovely than the outside although I sometimes dream of being the sort of person who crafts swags of ivy and holly and loops them from the beams. We do have cyclamen on the windowsills and a little lime tree brought in from the greenhouse, laden with limes (the best G&T ever has your own lime in it!).

Presents - I have bought some in a glorious bout of internet shopping and have the usual tricky people still to buy for. This year, extraordinarily, the list of tricky people does not include my father. I think this is the first time I have been able to say this in all my adult life. Even more extraordinarily, the reason he is not on the list is because he asked for the Philip Pullman trilogy, having apparently heard something about it on Radio 4. My dad has become a keen reader in his seventies which I still find surprising after a lifetime of doing not contemplating. You could have given me seventy guesses as to a book he might like and I would not have come up with the Philip Pullman but I loved them and I hope he will too. Tomorrow I will go into Chester which is a lovely city with many small shops crammed into the medieval buildings, as well as all the usual chains. I shall try really hard to support the small shops and to resist my usual urge to supplement everything I have already bought in a last minute sense that it all looks a bit mean.

I can't say I feel Christmassy at all yet. I am more excited by the yards and yards of bare rooted plants that have arrived to make more native hedging in the field: hawthorn and blacktorn, hazel and briar rose. It is all leaning against the stone wall of the utility under the yew tree for shelter just waiting to go into the trenches in the field.

What will make me feel like Christmas is the planning and buying of food which excites me every time. You can probably tell from the list in this blog that the things I have done are to do with food and the things that I haven't are not! Roll on stuffings!

six things

Eliane who writes a blog about all sorts of matters close to my heart (chickens, wood burning stoves, food) has tagged me to write six interesting things about myself. I think I was tagged to do this one a little while ago now and I suspect I used up anything even close to interesting then but I have had a go at some not terribly interesting but individual things.

My absolute favourite food, the thing I would have if I had to choose one thing to eat for the rest of my life, is Ian's homemade bread with far too much salty Welsh butter. It has to be homemade bread and real butter. I remember my grandmother giving me pieces of butter to eat like cheese when I was a child which perhaps accounts for my passion for it now. Anyone seeing one of my doorsteps for the first time tends to do a double take and sometimes I hope that, if I whisk the plate away before they can get a good look, maybe they are still thinking that the slice on my bread is cheddar.

When I was about fourteen and we lived in the South Island of New Zealand a small penguin hopped up to me on a stony beach and sat on my foot. It was surprisingly heavy.

I can do the Lotus position but I cannot touch my toes.

I love silence and can be guaranteed to sit in silence unless I am actively watching a television programme or listening to the radio. This is funny because I am married to a lovely man who likes the radio on wherever he is. I also love being outside. Being outside in the garden, in the sunshine, in the quiet, eating a piece of bread and butter and thinking about doing something in the greenhouse is my idea of near to heaven. All it lacks is my family, my bed and a glass of wine.

From my desk in Canary Wharf I can see the Milennium dome. From my desk at home I can see the pigsties.

I can interpret a set of accounts, speak a bit of Welsh, happily deliver a speech to hundreds. I can't dive, ski, do mental arithmetic or bear to watch The X Factor.

Chickens and the cycle of life (not for the squeamish)

I feel it is time for a chicken update.

We had friends staying last Friday night and in the morning my friend and I went to let the chickens out. It was cold but bright and still, the sky blue against the bare branches of the apple trees. As we went into the kitchen garden I thought I could see the two older chickens, who have a separate chicken house, out in their run. Odd, I thought, and odder still that they should be lying down. Everything said not right. The bodies of the hens lay in the run, decapitated. Rob opened the door and reached in. The breast meat had been taken from each.

Rob is a countryman. "Stoat," he said. "Stoat or weasel."

"But how did they get in?"

They must have squeezed their way under the floor of the house. All around the outside of the run was protected with a chicken wire skirt but we had not thought that anything could gain entrance through the tiny space under the house itself. We picked them up and took them to the bonfire where they were ceremonially despatched later in the day with the prunings from the gooseberry and redcurrant bushes. Sad to lose them and sad that their end was such a brutal one.

So that is the last of the four chickens which my friend incubated for me to start out chicken keeping life nearly two years ago. One was killed by a dog earlier this year protecting her new chicks, the cockerel, the glamourous Ormerod, was chased out by the same dog right up out into the lane and never recovered, and now the last two gone to nourish a stoat in this cold hard winter.

But the four chickens we kept from the great hatching in early June are going strong (ten eggs, seven hatched, three given to a friend and four installed in a converted and accidentally stoat-proof garden shed). And just this week they have begun to lay. I was entirely happy with the idea that they might not lay until February or March when the days begin to lengthen so I was delighted to find a single pale brown egg lying on the woodshavings in the hen house. The next day there was another and then for two or three days I found nothing. Ian wondered whether they were choosing to lay outside. A cockerel will keep watch for a laying hen so when I found one of our cockerels hanging around the front path for ten minutes or so I wondered if a hen was somewhere hidden away. I went out a few minutes later for some logs and he was gone but a rummage about revealed six eggs under the jasmine, probably three days worth of laying from both hens. It is such a joy to have our own eggs again. The deep orange yellow yolk and fresh taste are a revelation all over again after three months or so of buying even free range in the shops.

And so the wheel turns, I suppose. I shall buy some more chickens to supplement the flock if only I can find time between work and the house and the potting up of numbers of bare rooted plants bought for the garden and the growing demands of Christmas. Cards bought or sent? None. Cake made? Yes. Puddings? Yes. Presents made or bought? Just one or two for the easy people. Tomorrow afternoon I will engage it with it. Promise.