Let nothing you desire .....

Photo © Rob Jones

Merry Christmas to one and all ….

Especially the kind neighbours who brought over Christmas Dinner. Now despatched.

There are some certainties in this life, I have noticed, such as … where people keep the cellotape, or the arrangement of the cutlery drawer, or have a place where ‘oddments’ are kept like fuses, batteries and rubber bands and paperclips. Like some kind of socially inherited memory, things always seem to end up roughly in the same places.

I’ve done a lot of house sitting recently and it’s hit home how culturally familiar other people’s homes are.

Which is good. There’s nothing worse than wanting to find something in an emergency (a corkscrew for example) and potentially not knowing where to find it. If house sitting, you don’t want to give the impression of ‘rummaging’ through people’s drawers.

And the same seems to go for Christmas Dinner. Leave off any of the following at your peril - though I will cite optional extras at the end.

Turkey, stuffing, roast potatoes, peas, carrots, parsnips, sprouts, pigs in blankets or sausage meat, and …. GRAVY.

A few differences - Cranberry Sauce was never a thing in our household when I was young, nor indeed was Bread Sauce, and in fact I still have trouble knowing what it is. I included pigs in blankets but although we had sausage meat, the bacon actually migrated from a resting position over the turkey.

Though I shudder at the prospect - there are some who serve MASH. For them I reserve my ‘look’ that I use when I’ve left my glasses at home and I’m trying to make out the instructions on the back of a ready meal.

But - you could almost certainly guarantee that over more or less the whole of the country and indeed beyond, people were tucking into more or less the same thing.

It’s little short of a miracle.

And such things do happen at Christmas.

Have a merry remainder of one.

R.