So, this is the time of year when the more weak-willed amongst us – yes, I am looking at me – park our livers in a near-by side road; put our hearts in a seaside B&B, and our brains onto the back benches of the House of Lords whilst we subject our bodies to the gross abuse that is Christmas, prior to picking them back up on the 2nd of January and settling back into the normal routine of bodily maladministration that prevails for the bulk of the year. Christmas pudding deserts the brain around about the Spring Solstice, bread sauce clears the arteries by August and the several dozen roast potatoes are due to vacate the midriff by sometime in mid-November (but seldom do). Calanderists (Oh yes they are. I just looked it up.) invented New Year’s Day simply so that we had a point at which we could promise ourselves that we would never again do all of those things we have been doing over the previous seven days. Except, of course, we will. Apparently we consume an average of 5,373 calories on Christmas Day, although I think that without my individual input it would be much lower. I spend much of the day grazing like a dugong: if it is edible and on a flat surface, I will eat it, often without the use of my hands. Fruit, nuts, chocolate, cheese, crisps, pie, pudding or cake, leave it uncovered and it will be gone. I have to make sure that I am wearing my glasses for fear of eating my own fingers. And to wash it down? Well, anything in a bottle will suffice, starting with Buck’s Fizz, through beer, wine, brandy, gin and tonic, a quick detox on orange squash, all rounded off with the nice single malt that I hope somebody will have bought me to save me from having to drink my usual crap. If a bottle is open, I will drink it. If it is not, I will open it. What a way to spend the morning waiting for the day’s main event.
I don’t eat meat, so I always feel that I am owed extra pudding to compensate for turkey (which I never did like) and pigs in blankets, which I do not remember ever featuring in my childhood dinners. Sausage and bacon we did have, mind, sometimes rolled up and held together with a cocktail stick that nobody ever thought to warn you about. You have to wonder where these fanciful names came from. I remember in my waiting days serving Devils on Horseback which, to my recollection, featured a date, stuffed with an almond and wrapped in bacon: no devils, no horses – at least the pigs in blankets have pig – and Angels on Horseback, no angels, no horses, just what could very well have been coughed up by a Victorian coal miner wrapped in bacon. I can understand why chefs would wrap an oyster in pig – anything to save you having to look at it. I suppose that pigs must look forward to Christmas Day almost as much as turkeys.
If I’m absolutely honest, my favourite Christmas Day treat is usually raiding the kids’ selection boxes and blaming whomever has been foolhardy enough to fall asleep in front of Strictly for the subsequent gaps in the packaging.
I feel under a certain pressure to have eaten all the Christmas treats before the New Year arrives. Anything that has not gone by then tends to lurk forgotten in the back of a cupboard until mid-July when it appears, with a Gala Pie and sausage rolls, in a seaside picnic. I don’t care for picnics. My body is a temple…
Getting On 