Cornflower

Christmas cake

Stage one of the Christmas cake  - the soaking of the fruit in sherry - got underway last night.

We deviate from Mary Berry's recipe in that we always add large chunks of stem ginger (and I won't countenance black treacle!), but otherwise we follow her instructions in the trusty The AGA Book, (which has been superseded, I discover, by the  New Aga Cookbook ) and the cake turns out beautifully every year.

Mollie the opportunist is on hand in case any morsel falls to the floor as we weigh and mix.

Three days and regular stirring allows the fruit to take up the liquid and the flavours to meld, then we'll add the rest of the ingredients and bake it on Saturday.

Harriet has asked for the recipe - see below!

Seasonal reading - 3

  

 

     Some more books with a seasonal connection or a Christmas flavour. Apart from Dickens, of course, my shelves yield Susan Hill's marvellously atmospheric ghost story The Mist in the Mirror, and Charles Palliser's The Unburied, a pastiche of Victorian Gothic set in a cathedral close during the darkest days of the year. I can recommend them both, but I'd advise that for these chilling tales you draw your chair a little closer to the fire and have company at hand! On a different note, I remember Lucy Boston's The Children of Green Knowe as being magical.
Any more suggestions?

Seasonal reading - 2

     Here is another Christmas book, but one of a very different vintage to yesterday's novel. I have had this copy of Washington Irving's The Keeping of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall since I was a teenager, though it dates from 1906. I've read parts of it over the years but never the whole thing, and nor had its previous owner as some of the pages are still uncut! It is one of a series called "The English Idylls" and the illustrations - very much in keeping with that idea - are by C.E. Brock.

It's a view of "Merrie England", of course, and of its traditions and customs, the whole warmed with the glow of the welcoming firelight of which Irving speaks so fondly! And who could resist it?

(Note the sheet of tissue paper between the two illustrated pages).

For a book first published in 1822, the end has a surprisingly modern ring to it: talking of "the retired places where there are yet some traces to be met with of old English character", Irving says, "A little while hence and all these will probably have passed away...The old Hall will be modernised into a fashionable country seat, or, peradventure, a manufactory. The park will be cut up into petty farms and ktchen gardens. ...The village...will become thronged with coachmen, post-boys, tipplers and politicians; and Christmas, May Day, and all the other hearty merry-makings of the "good old times" will be forgotten."

Seems 'twas ever thus.

Seasonal reading - 1

    Clara made the excellent suggestion yesterday that we have a post on seasonal reading, and as I have the perfect book to start us off, let's do just that.
     I talked a little bit about Jane Gordon-Cumming's A Proper Family Christmas here the other day but it deserves more than a quick mention. I'll begin by saying that I haven't met Jane, but from her writing I would judge that she is a very warm and funny person, and someone who is jolly good to know. That's what her book is like - it's cosy and comfy (in the nicest sense), it exudes good humour, it makes you laugh, and I can see it dramatised as a Brian Rix farce type of thing because it's great light entertainment.
     Following an extended family over a Christmas holiday at grandfather William's huge country house, it has a cast of heroes, villains and fools, romance, snobbery, calculating unscrupulous money-grabbers, nice people who ought to find happiness in life (I fell for Oliver), and an excellent cat called Scratch.
     Along with its mix of characters come the inevitable tensions, disagreements and manoeuvrings that occur when a large family are together (some of them unwillingly) for what is supposed to be a happy occasion, and heightened expectations can but lead  - in these circumstances, at least - to disappointment for some. Written with brio, its depiction of a Christmas part of the family would prefer to forget but which others will remember with joy, is certainly a lot of fun.
    

One bag full

     I bought this bag at the Mindroom sale of work on Sunday, and it's perfect for holding my small collection of Shetland yarn while I plan my first trial piece of Fair Isle....

    One of the astonishing things I read in Ann Feitelson's The Art of Fair Isle Knitting was about the speed of the Shetland women who do this remarkable knitting: one eighty-five year old lady Ann Feitelson interviewed makes a beret, or a glove, every night in winter. As if that were not impressive enough, the most remarkable story dates from the 1920s when handknitting was a vital supplement to a family's income from fishing or crofting and time was of the essence in making a garment - "a 45 inch 'allover' [a sweater with patterns all over it] begun on a Tuesday was completed in the wee hours after midnight on Thursday to fill a special order which had to be mailed on Friday. The knitter never slept...and every bite of food she ate was set down next to her..."


     I once had a sweater made specially for me in Shetland by my friend Jimmy's mother. I asked Mrs. M. for a pattern of fish and waves in blues, greys and white, and two weeks later back came exactly that, perfect in every respect. I wish I still had it.

 

Ta dah!

 

    Mere months after we began to re-organise our books, we have pretty much finished! No untidy 'before' shots for you, just the well-ordered calm of the 'after'. You may notice some gaps on the shelves, and they are deliberate as not only do we have to house the forty or so volumes currently forming the TBR piles (not shown), our acquisition rate generally is pretty high and the space available will all too soon be filled.

    Banished elsewhere are Mr. C's more obscure books, while in the hall we have put shelves on opposite walls to hold 'light' and 'dark' respectively, i.e. Alexander McCall Smith and P.G. Wodehouse are there to brightly balance all the crime novels they look across at.

Biography, diaries and letters are now in the study but they may need a bit or re-arranging as from where I sit at my desk I have T.S. Eliot glooming at me while nice Andrew Marr is looming rather scarily from a shelf above.

Mr. C. has challenged me not to acquire any more books unless I can prove I have a proper place to put them (he's worried I'll ask him to put up more shelves). I've suggested that parting with his golf clubs and fishing rods would free up a nice lot of space......