One year, when I was a kid, I was ill on Christmas day morning; nothing really alarming and with no obvious cause, but I was feeling totally out of sorts.
My family used to spend Christmas at my grandparents’ house. Various aunts, uncles and cousins lived very near by - and over the course of the morning quite a few of them trooped in and stared at me and said how ill I looked and how they hoped I'd be able to manage a bit of Christmas dinner. And one uncle said, ‘Well perhaps he’ll be able to have a bit of turkey, even if he can’t manage all the trimmings.’
And this dismayed me because when it comes to Christmas dinner I liked the ‘trimmings’ much more than the turkey. It was the stuffing and the cranberry sauce, the pigs in blanket, and of course the roast potatoes, that really tickled my fancy.
Well the years have gone by and my feelings about the trimmings haven’t really changed, but fortunately since my mother’s no longer in charge of things I don’t have to eat turkey. This year’s bird was a mighty duck, from Creedy Carver of Devon – ‘reared for flavour’ – well, why not?
The inamorata and I worked diligently, and you know, it all went as well as it possibly could have, and I ate it with enthusiasm; duck, trimmings and all.
And as you may have spotted, this year the trimmings included red cabbage.
Oh yeah, and there were martinis too. We didn't have those at my grandparents' house.
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