Hogmanay again ...

Writing this at 01.10 on the first of January, I have to tell you that as we toasted our friends and each other this hogmanay, that's more or less what we said - another year, and we're still here! I shall have to research how many years we've celebrated this strangely ambiguous-feeling festival with our friends Di and Rob, but it's certainly the best way to stop the national tendency to sink into maudlin reminiscence! 

After a slow start, a big chunk of the day was taken up by preparations for tonight's dinner. I prepared a shed-load of roots - potatoes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, rainbow carrots - in the morning and filled the cooker top with pots. I cleaned the bath. (No, no-one was having a bath; it was just a tad dusty because neither of us ever does these days.) We ate lunch and fell asleep, while the sky darkened again (at about 3pm) and the wind rose and fell. 

We went for a walk. In the rain and wind. Of course we did.

Dinner was roasted venison fillet, from the hills around Dunoon. It cooked in 14 minutes in a hot oven and was pink and juicy and utterly delicious. I roasted all the veg in different trays - the carrots had the juice and skin of a clementine flavouring them ( the roasted skin is utterly delicious). It was almost time for them to come out of the oven when our guests arrived, so I raised the temperature, popped in the venison, told Siri to put the timer on and joined the others for champagne and nibbles. 

We were eating away (with seconds all round) when Di mentioned that she'd forgotten to make brandy butter this year - and I realised I'd not made any either. As a pudding without brandy butter is only half a pudding, I left the other three chatting and knocked up a small dish of same. Then I made custard, and dinner resumed. I insisted on flaming the brandy - I heated it in a small ladle over a candle and then tipped it sideways to the flame to ignite it before approaching the pudding. IT WORKED.  Dead classy, moi.

After dinner we had the usual dozy chat - until the chaps disappeared upstairs to look at a computer problem, They came back down in time for another glass of fizz before the bells - and then we did a mad thing. As we all go to the same Pilates teacher, we decided to create a bit of photographic evidence that we practise our exercises without fail, and all four of us prostrated ourselves and did elbow planks on the sitting room carpet. With a glass each - we'd just been toasting 2025. No, I'm not adding it here. Enough is enough. 

Happy New Year, all - here's to a peaceful world!