Reeeelaaaaax...

I utterly hate christmas dinner. I am a vegetarian so I hate the food to start with but I also hate the tension that goes with its creation. Mum never ever being able to sit down and open her presents until 3pm because she was busy making horrid gravy (everyone else liked it I hasten to add - I just don't like gravy). My parents now think that I have hooked up with Jamie Oliver because my partner has mostly always cooks christmas dinner. Thus he gets out of fitting batteries to things, figuring out Lego models, writing down who got what from whom. He swans in and out like Raymond flaming Blanc insiting that he can only alight for a while before going back to the cooking coal face. Then - when it is all assembled he insits we drop everything because it is ready NOW!He doles out huge, uneatable portions which the chidlren invariably winge about anyway and are wasted on me because I am a bloomin' vegetarian. My parents think he is marvellous.

Ungrateful sod that I am - it is time for him to get his own back for being unppreciated for all these years as I have insisted that this year I am cooking and it will be vegetarian. No animals will loose their lives to fuel our gluttony. It didn't go down well I can tell you. My dad looked like he might get back on the plane.

Still - armed with Northern's best recipe I started about 5 this evening. By half past five I had decided that all my family were idiots and why the bl**dy hell didn't I get to watch television, why were they dithering and getting in my way, couldnt' they see I was busy and where the b**** H*** was the S*** cranberries!

A major part of my manifesto was, of course, that my Christmas dinner was going to be relaxed so I thought it best to call for some artificial relaxants and start on the beer.

Jolly well worked. I feel quite suffused in the Christmas spirit. However - what you get when you spend the evening relaxed and jolly, allowing children unprecedented access to the Christmas chores is an icing sugar whirl wind which reached the mainland while they made the icing and a cake decorated to look like the local football pitch (complete with accurately included wind turbine) with a snowman as referee.

Jolly Good

Top Christmas one and all....