Facing the consequences

I MAKE THE MISTAKE of standing on the bathroom scales today - and I'm shocked to discover I've put on nearly half a stone in the last few days, the consequences of over-indulgence.

No wonder my trousers are feeling a little tight around the old waist.

This discovery, though, has put me into something of a flap.

Gone the days when I had no worries about putting on weight - it fell off almost as quickly as it went on.

Not so these days; some of it might come off, but by no means all.

The thought of drastic measures fleetingly passes through my mind - rejoining the gym, for example, and embarking on a diet of salad leaves... New Year resolutions and all that.

But then sanity returns, or maybe just plain laziness; why should I worry about putting on a few pounds? I get all the exercise I need just caring for My Good Lady, surely, what with pushing her hither and yon in her wheelchair?

And as for chomping on endless salads - to what end? On the whole my diet is a fairly healthy one and I have to say I do prefer to be the shape I am now than the stick insect I resembled in my youth.

So here I am, having already abandoned two resolutions and it's not even the New Year!

All the same I think I'll keep my eating to our more normal one-course-a-day for a while, just to be virtuous!

Olio

I'M LEAFING through an old cook book, given us long ago by an elderly neighbour who felt she no longer had need of it.

It's called The Olio Cookery Book, and it's by someone called L. Sykes; on the inside of the title page is the date of 1954 - the year wartime rationing came to an end.

The word olio is Spanish, apparently, and it means a mixture, medley or collection - and the book certainly is that.

Clearly compiled during the days of still-lingering deprivation and hardship, it encourages us to waste nothing and is full of little homilies to encourage us to virtue: things like "It is a sorry goose that will not baste herself" and "He that has no head deserves not a laced hat" and "Do as the lassies do, say no and tak' it".

Some of the recipes are as bemusing as these snippets of wisdom: I can't truthfully say I've ever heard of ray suds nor mock crab made from any old bit of white fish and served up on crab shells.

We are exhorted to make vegetarian stock by boiling up vegatable peelings - including potato, swede and onion skins.

As for making marzipan cakes by using mashed potato, sugar and powdered chocolate - the imagination boggles!

One or two recipies, though, I do like. Bible cake, for example:

½ lb. Judges V., verse 25 (last clause)
½ lb. Jeremiah VI., 20
½ lb. I Samuel XXX., 12
½ lb. Nahum III., 12 (chopped)
Season to taste with II Chronicles IX., 22
A pinch of Leviticus II., 13

and so on...

The other recipe I'd like to quote in full. It's for Bridescake and it goes:

1 lb. of love
½ lb. of butter of youth
½ lb. good looks
1 lb. sweet temper
½ lb. of blunder of faults
1 lb. of self-forgetfulness
1 oz. pounded wit
1 oz. of dry humour
2 tablespoons of sweet argument
1 pint of rippling laughter
A wineglass and a half of common sense

Mix the love, looks and sweet temper into a well-furnished house, beat the butter to a cream, mix these ingredients well together with the blunder of faults and self-forgetfulness, stir the pounded wit and dry humour with the sweet argument, then add it to the above.
Pour in gently the rippling laughter and common sense, and thoroughly mix.
Bake well forever.

I'd like Delia to try this one on!

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

The weekend before Christmas

WE HAVE AN ENJOYABLE MEAL yesterday, a lamb, carrot and swede bake - it plops away for four hours, the aromas of garlic and rosemary and of course the gently cooking shoulder of lamb infuse the whole house. By the end, we're almost drooling at the prospect of the wonderful treat to come.

To distract ourselves My Good Lady and I put up our little Christmas tree - artificial, of course - and very pretty it looks too.

And the sight of it now heralds the immediate run-up to the big day; we don't believe in putting such things up too early, as seems to be the fashion - nor do we waste time and electricity in festooning the outside of the house with strings of lights and oversized snowmen and Santas and the like.

Just our little tree with its fairy lights and a few baubles symbolising, I suppose, a light of hope in the winter darkness.

And finally, even MGL is coming round to something a little more like celebratory merriment - she even suggests opening a bottle of something vinous in the evening to help things along.

Yes, all in all, a pleasant weekend.

Full of festive spirit - who, me?

PEOPLE WHO KNOW ME WELL will tell you that I favour the bah-humbug school of thought when it comes to Christmas, and especially to its more commercialised aspects.

So it comes something of a shock to me that I seem to be enjoying the build-up to the festive season rather more than usual - certainly more than My Good Lady appears to be doing.

For example, as I write this blog, I'm listening to Desmond Carrington's radio show and with much pleasure to his collection of Christmas songs on the BBC iPlayer.

As we wander around the supermarket today, doing our weekly shop, I find myself humming along to White Christmas.

And I'm even keen to hang our modest decorations - usually a tedious task, but one I'm actually looking forward to this year.

Very odd behaviour for me, this - I feel a bit like Scrooge after his metamorphosis!

What is even odder, though, is that MGL is so lacking in the spirit this year; I try to push some cheer her way and she seems to push it right back at me.

It's as if our usual roles are reversed.

But oddly enough I think our feelings stem from the same cause - because it has been such a rotten year; and whereas MGL just wants to put the year behind her, I somehow want to rejoice over some of the good things we're blessed with.

It's all rather disconcerting.

Grand evening out

OH, THE PLEASURE of clear, cold days and sharp, frosty nights - what I think of as real Christmas weather!

After all that rain, rain, rain - such a joy... at least for the time being.

Even worth the minor inconvenience of having to pour a kettle full of warm water over the car's windows to melt the ice before we can set off.

There are seven of us at the Christmas dinner in the end - maybe not as many as we hoped for, but more than we feared. And an enjoyable time, I think, was had by all - certainly by My Good Lady and I.

As for the food, the Pub did us very well - although, I must say, portion control is not exactly their strong suit. By the time I'd got through the butternut squash soup I was almost too full for the main course - an excellent steamed venison pudding with mushrooms, button onions and red wine gravy.

And even if numbers were somewhat down on previous years, the warmth and conviviality of the company was no less boisterous than in previous times.

Yes, a grand evening out.

A couple of disasters and a modest triumph

IT'S BEEN A weekend fraught, this, between the burnt turkey and the drains overflowing with blockage.

First the Christmas turkey. It's the first time we've tried roasting a bird as big as this in our new fan-assisted oven, and boy, did we get the timings wrong on this one!

What emerged from the cooking was something that was so dry as be virtually inedible.

Moreover, by some mental aberration we weighed out nearly double the amount of Brussels sprouts than we should have done, and somehow, too the gravy ended up so thick as to almost need cutting with a knife!

Of course, when I lifted the bird out of the roasting tray it fell to pieces, all in a heap - a real mess of meat, skin, bone and stuffing!

We ate as much of it as we could but neither My Good Lady nor I were exactly calling for second helpings - indeed a fair bit of it went out onto the bird table and there at least some starlings seemed to enjoy it.

The remainder of the turkey went into the freezer and it will no doubt in due course find its way into curries and quiches and the like.

Meanwhile, the drains have been overflowing for some time, and no amount of plunging with the mop or using chemical blockage remover seemed to have any effect.

So, today, we have to call in the professionals. They finally manage to lift the manhole cover and there we discover the problem - when we had the driveway re-cemented a couple of years ago a lot of debris found its way into the drain, partially obstructing the water course.

And of course all the gunk that gets flushed down into the drains simply built up and up until the inevitable overflow.

Oh, the lads got it cleared quickly enough, but it was just one more problem which we could have done without.

Still, it hasn't been a totally unrelieved weekend of gloom - in fact, my experimental cook session was a modest triumph, though I do say so myself. A simple enough dish - a pilau, a Greek rice thing, but given a lift by my using Morecambe Bay shirmps. Beautiful!

Somehow a small compensation for an otherwise stressful few days.

Friends past and present

WE ARE SITTING IN the Geriatrics’ Corner of the Pub, the two of us alone except for Dick and a couple of the staff behind the bar.

The logs are crackling away warmly in the stove, a cosy reminder – should one be needed – that it’s mighty cold and dark and wet outside.

And looking around the Corner I reflect soberly that it wasn’t so long ago that this room was regularly filled with light and chatter and laugher. There would often be twenty or more friends gathered here, all talking at once, filling the place with life (and almost deafening noise).

How quickly things do change!

But I mustn’t allow myself to get too maudlin – we’ve much to look forward to. Especially tomorrow, when we’re roasting our Christmas turkey.

What? A little early you say?

Ah, but there’s madness in our method!

By doing our annual Big Bird early, we free up the actual festive days for something we can make up quickly and easily. Turkey slices topped with cream and grated cheese and grilled for a few minutes and served with home-cut chunky chips and Brussels’ sprouts for example – the whole meal takes no more than thirty minutes. And it’s quite delicious.

And so, instead of worrying about our Xmas din dins, we can pop open a bottle of fizz and put on a favourite video – something like Casablanca, or Calamity Jane, or The Jungle Book.

Actually, we’re having our Christmas Day lunch out this year, with friends, but the principle still applies to the rest of the festive season generally.

With friends… Yes, somehow after this ghastly year we’re more aware of our friends and we’re deeply grateful for them. We really are very lucky to have them.

Techno problems

I'M OVER AT FRAN AND DEN'S today, trying to fix their computer printer problem - that's to say, trying to get it to work.

Nothing I do seems to have any effect and finally I admit defeat. "Get a professional in," I tell them, and I give them the name of the young genius who sorted out my IT difficulties.

Thing of it is, I don't really understand the techno side of - well, anything really... I just push a few buttons and hope for the best.

A sad reflection from one who used to work in the early days of the computer industry.

I mean I remember the days when you needed to use reels of paper tape, with holes punched along its length, to input data; and heaven help you if the tape snapped or got itself mangled up in the machine's gubbins. You literally had to repair it with scissors and self-adhesive plastic.

Room-sized computers in those days had less computing power than a modern pocket calculator.

Don't get me wrong, I love the whole modern technology thing: to me it boldly goes where no technology has gone before. I suppose I love it because it's mysterious, and because like most ignoramuses, I only partly understand it.

"Omne ignotum pro magnifico" the old Latin tag has it, "Everything unexplained is (thought to be) magnificent". Very true.

The only trouble is that the more technology advances the further away from me it gets!

I suppose I still wish that all technological problems could be solved with scissors and Sellotape.