Chris Hansen’s blog

We had a pretty dull Christmas, really. Midnight Mass, then Mass on Christmas Day. After Mass I cooked up a pot of Mother Hansen’s Spaghetti and Meatballs for our guests, Alex and , who stayed with us Christmas Eve and Christmas Day because there is no public transport in the UK on Christmas Day, thus he’d have had a difficult time getting down to his RC church on Christmas Day to sing. He gave HWMBO and me books. Most interesting to me is the new biography of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I shall read it as soon as I can. We gave a jar of farmer’s honey. No big expenditures this year.

I made a bowl of eggnog from scratch (you can’t get it in quarts here, unfortunately) and it was OK, though mostly for the alcohol. brought some French bread to eat with the spaghetti, but I put it in the oven to warm up, turned the oven off before serving the spaghetti, and we all forgot about it. We had toast for dinner and for breakfast, and there’s still some left.

also brought a small bottle of Madeira wine, which was very nice and a good sendoff to the dessert, homemade squash and mince pies. I had squash, and realised that using molasses rather than sugar does actually affect the taste very significantly. However, it was in a good way–much more earthy.

We watched the Queen tell us how terrible the economic crisis is and watched her home movies of the baby Prince of Wales (he turned 60 last month) dressed in a baby dress crawling around the Queen. We watched several Wallace and Gromit programs, including the new one casting Wallace and Gromit as bakers A Matter of Loaf and Death and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. There was also a retrospective of Blackadder with interviews of the actors, including a pudgy Stephen Fry having his feet massaged by an African lady.

In between I took to the computer (they were watching A Shark’s Tale and Doctor Who, neither of which I wanted to watch.

Thus to bed. I think I ate too much and am paying for it this morning. We will have lots of spaghetti sauce around: I froze some of it so we will have remembrances of Christmas for months to come.

When we watched the news there were endless reports on the deaths of Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt (Christmas is a slow news day so they had lots of time to kill by running appreciations of them both). Sorry to see them both go.

We’ll go out for a walk this afternoon (most everything here is closed on Boxing Day except for the stores and the public transport) and enjoy the partly sunny skies over London.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 10:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.