Cooking up some cheer ...

After yesterday's apocalyptic blip, something more cheerful: I made my Christmas puddings this afternoon. The photo shows the mix (seemed very gloopy this year - the eggs were big), my grandmother's cookery book (the old Glasgow Cookery Book, with extraordinary recipes for stuffed head and a section on "invalid cookery" which isn't stuff you actually can't eat but rather catering for poorly people with little appetite), and the empty cinnamon jar to remind me I've finished it. I love the cookery book; it's full of my grandmother's handwriting (green ink, fountain pen) with comments like "this is good" and "Dad likes this"...

All through the measuring and mixing I was following a wonderful thread of conversation on Facebook, beginning with an old friend telling me he'd seen a poem of mine printed large-scale on a window of the St Andrew's Bus Station. This led - don't ask me how - to another friend challenging me to write a sonnet about walking in the rain, and to me sitting down (once I'd put the puds to steam and washed up all the not inconsiderable mess) to compose one on the back of a brown envelope (I have a fear of proper, pristine paper for poetry composition). It was the first sonnet I'd attempted in 37 years, and you can see the results here.